Troy Lee Hudson's LiveJournal
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Below are the 5 most recent journal entries recorded in
Troy Lee Hudson's LiveJournal:
Wednesday, March 20th, 2002 | 6:40 pm |
Musical Fish While researching movement titles for Gustav Holst's Second Suite in F, one of very few well known classical works for military band, I found the following interesting message: "But it is in the last movement where Holst shows how easy it had become for him to combine melodies seemlessly. He uses a catchy six eight tune that is woven throughout all the instruments, including a duet between the piccolo and tuna, and combines it with the familiar 'Greensleeves.'" http://wso.williams.edu/~ktaylor/gholst/compositions/brass/suite_2.htmlI mean, I guess I wouldn't expect the 'chicken of the sea' to have quite so deep a voice... Current Mood: amusedCurrent Music: Holst - Second Suite in F - 4th movement | Tuesday, March 12th, 2002 | 4:58 pm |
something noteworthy Ah, so, my fears are confirmed. Even with an on-line journal, my updates are likely to be infrequent at best. Granted, it's been a rather hectic past few weeks. The quarter is rapidly drawing to a close and I've had a number of large projects approach me at break-neck speed. I've been spared on a few fronts, though. Rather than having three final exams, two final presentations, and a final paper due in 10 days time, I've only got one final exam, two final presentations, and a partridge in a Martian carbonate reservoir. Blah. But what, you may ask, has motivated me to take time out of my excessively busy end-of-term schedule to write a journal entry? Today I and some other Geology and Planetary Science graduate students were having lunch with a prospective grad student at the Athenaeum (the faculty club and the best strawberry lemonade in this corner of the Time Cube). So we're sitting there, having a merry old lunch, and I glance over my right shoulder to the table next to us, which has recently become occupied...by Stephen Hawking. Okay, way damn cool, right? Totally the sort of thing to make you sit up and take notice. Thing is, nobody did. Apparently he comes to Caltech rather often, a not at all surprizing fact. You might think that I'd be used to seeing famous scientists, having studied and worked at MIT. Hell, I've had dinner with Buzz Aldrin, had my picture taken with Senator John Glenn, and had sex with a three-star general in the US Airforce. I'm not unused to knowing famous or important people. But for God's sake...it was Stephen Hawking!! Ah well, at least something good came of the encounter. It got me writing again! More to follow, though don't expect anything between March 21 and the 31st. I'll be in Utah doing off-roading and camping in national parks with my buddy Marc. Current Mood: happyCurrent Music: ATB techno | Monday, February 11th, 2002 | 8:47 pm |
Burble, shudder, PFFFzzzzzzzzzzzz.... POP!
I'm sorry - I was saying something about how many coincidences one person could reasonably handle without going into synaptic cross-junction meltdown.. Well, it happened. Fortunately, there was about a 24 hour hiatus, so the effects were not permanent. But they did result in my almost being creamed by a fast moving car.
So, I'd run off to San Diego this weekend to meet up with my friend Marc and go off-roading and camping in his Jeep. (This guy is into Jeep like some people are into J. Crew or Tummy Pokefinger...he's got all the accessories! Even a Jeep-brand tent. It's Malibu Barbie in the Barbie Dream Car!) I'm hanging out in Hillcrest waiting for 11am, crossing the street while reading some material for my Aerospace design class, and I hear, "Troy!"
What? Huh? When? Who? I swear, he looked 32, officer!
WHAM! There's Karl and Scott, looking the perfect couple in gym outfits and gym bags, crossing the street and about two feet away from me. Okay, so I didn't think I'd be in San Diego long enough to drop in and say, "Hi." to them...so they just mess with the fates and show up on the street EXACTLY when I'm there.
But Wait, There's More!
So, Marc, Rob, and I are out in the desert, checking out an abandoned Dolomite mine, and we're fiddling about taking pictures. Then Marc spouts some partial quote from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which I promptly finish. (can't remember the quote now - will be added at a later date) So we start throwing quotes at each other and laughing our asses off...while poor Rob is standing there dumbfounded (or at least amused at our extreme geekyness). And of course, it doesn't stop there. We later find out that we have very similar appreciations for humor - Tom Lehrer being the most entertaining. Picture two guys, for all intents and purposes looking like Marine buddies out for a weekend of camping, off-roading, and drinking, sitting around a campfire singing The Vatican Rag at the tops of their lungs. (much to the dismay of our neighbor campers and the third in our group....poor Rob.)
Now How Much Would You Pay?!?
"Oh the things those hands will do!"
ALl in all, it was a fantastic weekend. All except for the cactus experience. Though I realized how utterly dispassionate I get when my own health is at stake. I mean, as i was pulling out one of the approximately 200 needles embedded in my hands, I was admiring the evolutionary construction of this mode of deffense. I mean, the needles don't just go into your hand and cause a puncture wound - they've actually got little tiny barbs on the ends which angle backwards and make it either stay in your flesh, or tear out a little tiny chunk when you actually get a good enough grip to pull it out. And as I'm doing this to myself with a pair of pliers (didn't have any tweezers in the field) I'm thinking - where's the advantage in that? I mean, any animal which tries to take a bite will get wounded...but there's really no need to keep reminding them that they did a bad thing. Maybe Nature is malacious after all.
No, probably not. But it sure as hell felt like it at the time.
Current Mood: relaxed Current Music: _ripping_ | Thursday, February 7th, 2002 | 9:59 pm |
Totally Weirded Out!! Okay, I'm on a total adrenaline rush now. Not from anything life-threatening...but from an extrodinarily unlikely chain of events. (And I was worried I wouldn't have anything to put into these journals! Hah!)
So, I just went to see _A Beautiful Mind_ with my friend Jonathon. One of the movie's sub-themes is pattern recognition, which in a way could be viewed as detecting coincidences. So, after the movie we were exchanging our opinions of it, and I was commenting on the real, fake, and real fake math one sees in movies like this, _Good Will Hunting_, _Supernova_, and the new _The Time Machine_ (watch that one - you may be in for a surprize!) Then got into a story about how, at my fraternity at MIT (Zeta Beta Tau), some of the brothers, in remodelling their room, were walling off part of the wall (eh?) and decided to write some profound fake-math (e.g. P=NP, etc.) on the wall before covering it up.
As I'm relating this story, and Jonathan and I are walking across Colorado Blvd. (at 11:00 at night) I glance to my left and WHAM! There's Adam Reynolds, MIT/ZBT class of 2001, former ZBT president and fellow sufferer of 8.04 and 8.044 (quantum physics and statistical mechanics, for those of you not in the know about MIT lingo). He's also crossing the street, in the same direction, with two of his friends. They turn out to be MIT grads as well: they were on the crew team with Adam. One works in Santa Monica for a video game company (You hear that, Adam! (other Adam)), and the other, Eric, is a grad student in chemistry here at Caltech. And he knows Chris Thomas, a brother of mine from my *other* MIT fraternity, Alpha Chi Sigma (professional chemistry fraternity), who's also here at Caltech. And through MIT/AXE/Pi Lambda Phi (Eric's fraternity), we both know a guy named Marco Mena.
How many coincidences can one person reanosably handle in 5 minutes without having their head blow up? AAArrrrghhhh! | 5:37 pm |
FUUUUUCCCCKKKK!!! Okay, this is really bad. I had this near 500 word journal entry to start out with. It was somewhat inelegant, but it detailed my struggles to go from a hankering to start a livejournal last night to finally getting around to it today - and all the tribulations I'd been thorough in the last 30 minutes. (things like trying to download and install the Logjam client and being unable to, an attachment that wouldn't open, a computer crash, and a phone call altering my evening plans right in the middle). I had it all typed into this nifty little journal entry form and was just about to send it all in as my first entry (appropriately titled 'An inauspicious beginning') ANd what did I do? Oh juch clicked on the little 'You're looking at the simple page. For more options, click here.' thingy...and Konqueror (my Gnome web browser) promptly crahses. Taking all of my java scripted text with it. I am really angry now. Not a good way to try to start a new habit (i.e. journal entries). But I've got to go fucking play with nitrogen now, so I'll be back later to maybe make things sound a little bit better. Current Mood: pissed off |
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