I'm about to be brilliant!
Friday, May 24th, 2002 12:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flwydWell, not really. But the source of that remark will become clear shortly.
This week, I've spent most of my productive time working on the Colorado Beta bid for the Tau Beta Pi 2005 national convention. 2005 is our (and Colorado Alpha's) 100th birthday, and it's also the 100th convention. So the Centennial State ought to be the perfect place for it. Now, being a geek with lots of time, I decided to one-up the usual bid procedure of listing a bunch of airfares from a bunch of cities (some of which wouldn't even be flown from - Alaska Alpha is in Fairbanks, not Anchorage) and then taking the mean of those cities' prices call that the "average ticket price." Instead, I created a list of the cities housing each chapter and what major airport they're closest to. I will then obtain prices from those airports to Denver, multiply that number by the number of schools using the airport, and provide a weighted average airfare. (Of course, since 75% of the schools are east of the 98W, this may make our air prices look worse and applying it to eastern schools may make them look better. But we're an engineering honor society. Optimizing is our second nature.) This task allowed me to spend most of the day staring at the 2000 Rand McNally U.S.A. Road Atlas, something I enjoy imensely. My knowledge of state capitals has fallen since 4th grade. Possibly because the maps I've looked at since then show more than one city per state, so I tend to think that, say, Portland is the capital of Oregon. I also tend to forget some of the odd capitals like Dover and, er, what's the capital of Maryland again? Crap.
Anyway, finishing my task of locating 225 colleges in a Road Atlas (including locations like Notre Dame, IN, which is not on the map, since it is, I assume, to South Bend what Gunbarrel is to Boulder. Except a lot more up-scale and distinguished), I spent the next few hours with the road atlas generating a possible route for my Great American Journey.
(You may skip this section if you don't care about said journey. But please glance through it, in case you have recommendations of things, places, and people I should visit on such a journey.)
The trip takes place in two phases - Deserts, Coastlines, and Forests of the West and Cities, Rain, and Green Fields of the East. The journey takes place in a van fitted with a hammock The Western Phase starts in Boulder, natch, and heads south through the San Luis Valley into New Mexico. Spend a couple days camping around various mesas. Hit up Saguaro National Park and Organ Pipe in Airozona, maybe hit up something across the border. Stroll up to Joshua Tree National Park, spending a day there. Spend a few days in LA doing who knows what. Meander up CA 1, then celebrate the end of school with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mlechan. Spend a couple days in the Bay Area before camping in the N. CA forests. Check out Crater Lake. Maybe find Brian York if he's still in Oregon. Kick it in Seattle for a couple days; checking out the rainforest. Head up to Sandpoint and get some tips for good ghost towns and obscure musea from Scott Kirby. Take that info and prowl around Montana, being sure to check out Butte. Camp a day in Yellowstone before heading through Idaho to Nevada, taking US 93 down, checking out Great Basin and some appropriately spacey middle-of-nowhere spot. Turn left at Panaca to Utah. Not a lot of folks go out of their way to drive through Nevada the long way, and even fewer who don't stop in Vegas. But this leg of the trip is a desert romance. The Western Phase finishes with Zion, Grand Canyon North Rim, Grand Staircase, and Canyonlands before I drag myself up the Western Slope and back to Boulder, rest stop. An efficient estimates places such a trip at 32 days. Assume 40, starting around June 8.
The Eastern Phase would thus start some time around the 20th of July. Spend the first day on I70 en route to Kansas City, where I can hang with my homies. Wander through the Ozarks, maybe catch a Cardinals game at home. Head up through Illinois to Milwaukee, hang with several friends up there who don't know each other. Spend a day in Chicago doing who knows what. Enjoy the fingers of the Michigan glove, head up to Toronto. Explore upstate New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Hit up Boston for a couple days. New York for four or five. Philly, Washington for several days. Possibly head to Indianapolis for GenCon. West Virginia and the Appalachian so-called Mountains. Check out the Research Triangle, South Carolina, and Georgia. Enjoy the Florida swamps. Check out what Alabama has to offer, hang out in New Orleans. Head up (the) Mississippi to Memphis. Head up to Kentucky and Mammoth Cave. Head back through Arkansas, Oklahoma, north Texas, and back up to Boulder, exhausted and fulfilled. A low estimate for such a phase, not including the GenCon possibility, is 35 days. A longer estimate puts me at the end of August. Perfect time to select a job based on a location which I am now familiar with :-)
All told, each state visited (or at least passed through) save Alaska, Hawaii, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota, three of which I've spent quality time in. Plus two countries I've never visited, doubling the number of non-U.S. countries I'll have been in.
The overall goal of such a trip is to learn more about America. Its landscapes, its cities, its people. Having spent 99.9% of my time on this planet in the Boulder Bubble, I'm woefully unpractically educated on such matters. That same naïvete will give me a chance to record observations as an outsider. It will also give me a chance to meet up with my scattered friends and make new ones. It will give me a basis for selecting where I want to live, work, and play. It will also be a chance to explore independence, solitude, and whimsy.
So that was my Wednesday. Returning from that tangent, I got up early on Thursday and headed down to Denver to check out two hotels as potential convention sites. I'm not sure what to make of my observations of the mixed uniformity (inside the rooms) and uniqueness of hotels. I then decided to take a bus down town (on which I had the unusual experience of being the only white passenger for a half hour journey -- that doesn't happen in Boulder). I proceeded to walk down the 16th St. Mall, which doesn't feel as personal, funky, and unique as Pearl St. First, there weren't any street performers or panhandlers, both of which considerably improve the ambiance of the mall. There didn't seem to be hardly any just-one-store businesses there, and certainly no funky spots like The Lighthouse or Left Hand bookstores or Into the Wind. But I managed to wander into the Tattered Cover, which is neat and worthwhile. I discovered that The Salmon of Doubt is out, though still in hardcover. Having spent about $40 on books recently, I decided to wait for it to come out in paperback. It does look good, though. Not only does it have a constructed version of DNA's work-so-far on Salmon of Doubt, it also has many short musings, essays, and letters, as well as material like Young Zaphod Plays it Safe, which those of us who have each individual book didn't feel the need to acquire. Hopefully I'll get a chance to read it after my incomplete is out of the way but before I'm completely engulfed in my Masters Thesis and other projects.
As I got back to Boulder around 4:30 it was beginning to rain. By 5:30, when the softball game I was supposed to umpire was scheduled, the field was getting questionable, with no sign of cesation. I elected to postpone my game until Friday; the other field decided to try to play, but gave up after a while (making me feel good, since my only water protection was a Cardinals hat and a windbreaker). The deluge continued, and I spent some time wandering around in it, making sure nobody showed up for the second scheduled game (the field was quite liquid by 6:45) and helping lost participants in the Oddesy of the Mind World Championships find their way. I then hit up The Video Station for Singin' In The Rain.
I was familiar only with The Famous Scene, and so figured the movie would have rain in several other scenes (a Musical Noir?) and be a fairly cheesy fluffy lame musical. But it's #50 on IMDb's Top 100 (of which I've now seen 54, 31 in the top 50, plus 101-105), so it's on my list to see, and what more perfect night? I was pleasantly surprised, though, at how funny (and not just in a B-movie way) the movie was. At times, it seemed to lampoon the musical genre (and it consistently had fun at the expense of the Studio System), while still remaining a completely straight up musical. The zany action and the dialog (including the topic line) bordered on Marx Brothers quality, though the stellar dialog rarely exceeded two lines. Gene Kelly is a great dancer and choreographer, and fortunately the movie kept most of its dancing to him and the great comical performances put in by Donald O'Connor. My dad even watched some of it, after badmouthing musicals for five or ten minutes when I mentioned I'd picked the movie up. (There's a reason my cinematic education has been relatively free of musicals, and he is it.) And as it so happened, the Soup Nazi episode was on shortly after the movie ended, which I hadn't seen before. That's gotta be one of the best episodes in any TV show ever. Three simultaneous intertwined consistently funny plotlines, wonderful characterization. Too bad the rest of Seinfeld isn't consistently this quality.
While standing around in the rain, I realized that I wasn't particularly opposed to being in the rain (as I'd though previously). Rather, rain interferes with most of the outdoor activities I enjoy (biking, baseball, reading, walking through dry leaves, lying about under trees) are not nearly as fun in the rain. So living in a high-rain environment might cause me to be more computer bound and geeky than I already am. Slightly less worrysome.
This week, I've spent most of my productive time working on the Colorado Beta bid for the Tau Beta Pi 2005 national convention. 2005 is our (and Colorado Alpha's) 100th birthday, and it's also the 100th convention. So the Centennial State ought to be the perfect place for it. Now, being a geek with lots of time, I decided to one-up the usual bid procedure of listing a bunch of airfares from a bunch of cities (some of which wouldn't even be flown from - Alaska Alpha is in Fairbanks, not Anchorage) and then taking the mean of those cities' prices call that the "average ticket price." Instead, I created a list of the cities housing each chapter and what major airport they're closest to. I will then obtain prices from those airports to Denver, multiply that number by the number of schools using the airport, and provide a weighted average airfare. (Of course, since 75% of the schools are east of the 98W, this may make our air prices look worse and applying it to eastern schools may make them look better. But we're an engineering honor society. Optimizing is our second nature.) This task allowed me to spend most of the day staring at the 2000 Rand McNally U.S.A. Road Atlas, something I enjoy imensely. My knowledge of state capitals has fallen since 4th grade. Possibly because the maps I've looked at since then show more than one city per state, so I tend to think that, say, Portland is the capital of Oregon. I also tend to forget some of the odd capitals like Dover and, er, what's the capital of Maryland again? Crap.
Anyway, finishing my task of locating 225 colleges in a Road Atlas (including locations like Notre Dame, IN, which is not on the map, since it is, I assume, to South Bend what Gunbarrel is to Boulder. Except a lot more up-scale and distinguished), I spent the next few hours with the road atlas generating a possible route for my Great American Journey.
(You may skip this section if you don't care about said journey. But please glance through it, in case you have recommendations of things, places, and people I should visit on such a journey.)
The trip takes place in two phases - Deserts, Coastlines, and Forests of the West and Cities, Rain, and Green Fields of the East. The journey takes place in a van fitted with a hammock The Western Phase starts in Boulder, natch, and heads south through the San Luis Valley into New Mexico. Spend a couple days camping around various mesas. Hit up Saguaro National Park and Organ Pipe in Airozona, maybe hit up something across the border. Stroll up to Joshua Tree National Park, spending a day there. Spend a few days in LA doing who knows what. Meander up CA 1, then celebrate the end of school with
mlechan. Spend a couple days in the Bay Area before camping in the N. CA forests. Check out Crater Lake. Maybe find Brian York if he's still in Oregon. Kick it in Seattle for a couple days; checking out the rainforest. Head up to Sandpoint and get some tips for good ghost towns and obscure musea from Scott Kirby. Take that info and prowl around Montana, being sure to check out Butte. Camp a day in Yellowstone before heading through Idaho to Nevada, taking US 93 down, checking out Great Basin and some appropriately spacey middle-of-nowhere spot. Turn left at Panaca to Utah. Not a lot of folks go out of their way to drive through Nevada the long way, and even fewer who don't stop in Vegas. But this leg of the trip is a desert romance. The Western Phase finishes with Zion, Grand Canyon North Rim, Grand Staircase, and Canyonlands before I drag myself up the Western Slope and back to Boulder, rest stop. An efficient estimates places such a trip at 32 days. Assume 40, starting around June 8.The Eastern Phase would thus start some time around the 20th of July. Spend the first day on I70 en route to Kansas City, where I can hang with my homies. Wander through the Ozarks, maybe catch a Cardinals game at home. Head up through Illinois to Milwaukee, hang with several friends up there who don't know each other. Spend a day in Chicago doing who knows what. Enjoy the fingers of the Michigan glove, head up to Toronto. Explore upstate New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Hit up Boston for a couple days. New York for four or five. Philly, Washington for several days. Possibly head to Indianapolis for GenCon. West Virginia and the Appalachian so-called Mountains. Check out the Research Triangle, South Carolina, and Georgia. Enjoy the Florida swamps. Check out what Alabama has to offer, hang out in New Orleans. Head up (the) Mississippi to Memphis. Head up to Kentucky and Mammoth Cave. Head back through Arkansas, Oklahoma, north Texas, and back up to Boulder, exhausted and fulfilled. A low estimate for such a phase, not including the GenCon possibility, is 35 days. A longer estimate puts me at the end of August. Perfect time to select a job based on a location which I am now familiar with :-)
All told, each state visited (or at least passed through) save Alaska, Hawaii, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota, three of which I've spent quality time in. Plus two countries I've never visited, doubling the number of non-U.S. countries I'll have been in.
The overall goal of such a trip is to learn more about America. Its landscapes, its cities, its people. Having spent 99.9% of my time on this planet in the Boulder Bubble, I'm woefully unpractically educated on such matters. That same naïvete will give me a chance to record observations as an outsider. It will also give me a chance to meet up with my scattered friends and make new ones. It will give me a basis for selecting where I want to live, work, and play. It will also be a chance to explore independence, solitude, and whimsy.
So that was my Wednesday. Returning from that tangent, I got up early on Thursday and headed down to Denver to check out two hotels as potential convention sites. I'm not sure what to make of my observations of the mixed uniformity (inside the rooms) and uniqueness of hotels. I then decided to take a bus down town (on which I had the unusual experience of being the only white passenger for a half hour journey -- that doesn't happen in Boulder). I proceeded to walk down the 16th St. Mall, which doesn't feel as personal, funky, and unique as Pearl St. First, there weren't any street performers or panhandlers, both of which considerably improve the ambiance of the mall. There didn't seem to be hardly any just-one-store businesses there, and certainly no funky spots like The Lighthouse or Left Hand bookstores or Into the Wind. But I managed to wander into the Tattered Cover, which is neat and worthwhile. I discovered that The Salmon of Doubt is out, though still in hardcover. Having spent about $40 on books recently, I decided to wait for it to come out in paperback. It does look good, though. Not only does it have a constructed version of DNA's work-so-far on Salmon of Doubt, it also has many short musings, essays, and letters, as well as material like Young Zaphod Plays it Safe, which those of us who have each individual book didn't feel the need to acquire. Hopefully I'll get a chance to read it after my incomplete is out of the way but before I'm completely engulfed in my Masters Thesis and other projects.
As I got back to Boulder around 4:30 it was beginning to rain. By 5:30, when the softball game I was supposed to umpire was scheduled, the field was getting questionable, with no sign of cesation. I elected to postpone my game until Friday; the other field decided to try to play, but gave up after a while (making me feel good, since my only water protection was a Cardinals hat and a windbreaker). The deluge continued, and I spent some time wandering around in it, making sure nobody showed up for the second scheduled game (the field was quite liquid by 6:45) and helping lost participants in the Oddesy of the Mind World Championships find their way. I then hit up The Video Station for Singin' In The Rain.
I was familiar only with The Famous Scene, and so figured the movie would have rain in several other scenes (a Musical Noir?) and be a fairly cheesy fluffy lame musical. But it's #50 on IMDb's Top 100 (of which I've now seen 54, 31 in the top 50, plus 101-105), so it's on my list to see, and what more perfect night? I was pleasantly surprised, though, at how funny (and not just in a B-movie way) the movie was. At times, it seemed to lampoon the musical genre (and it consistently had fun at the expense of the Studio System), while still remaining a completely straight up musical. The zany action and the dialog (including the topic line) bordered on Marx Brothers quality, though the stellar dialog rarely exceeded two lines. Gene Kelly is a great dancer and choreographer, and fortunately the movie kept most of its dancing to him and the great comical performances put in by Donald O'Connor. My dad even watched some of it, after badmouthing musicals for five or ten minutes when I mentioned I'd picked the movie up. (There's a reason my cinematic education has been relatively free of musicals, and he is it.) And as it so happened, the Soup Nazi episode was on shortly after the movie ended, which I hadn't seen before. That's gotta be one of the best episodes in any TV show ever. Three simultaneous intertwined consistently funny plotlines, wonderful characterization. Too bad the rest of Seinfeld isn't consistently this quality.
Addendum
While standing around in the rain, I realized that I wasn't particularly opposed to being in the rain (as I'd though previously). Rather, rain interferes with most of the outdoor activities I enjoy (biking, baseball, reading, walking through dry leaves, lying about under trees) are not nearly as fun in the rain. So living in a high-rain environment might cause me to be more computer bound and geeky than I already am. Slightly less worrysome.
