I know it doesn’t sound very celebratory to have leftover pizza for one’s birthday dinner, but it made the most logistical sense. We traditionally go out to Pizza Hut on New Year’s evening, but this year we were invited to the Fasoldts’ house. We therefore combined that tradition with our Saturday night customs and with my birthday, and went out for pizza last night. Half of it we had for lunch today, followed by cake.

Through a combination of ideas from my sister, my dad, and I, she made a cake in the form of my TJP initial monogram. I directed her as to how to make the shape out of one square and circle cake each. She decorated it in an imitation of an item I once made out of those melting bead things. (I had discovered that it fits perfectly in the heart-shaped templates we had.)

When people ask me what I want for presents, all I can think of to tell them are some assorted gadgets I’d find useful. My parents didn’t want to try to get any of the things I mentioned and risk messing it up, so they gave me $20 bills concealed within the wrappers of big candy bars. That and two cards was all I got gift-wise, so now it’s off to the web to pick out my own presents.

And in other news, my goatee has its 1st birthday today.

The people I talk to the most in person are the ones I work with for InterVarsity. Stephen is the brother of Richard, a recently-graduated senior also from IV. (When I first saw him, I thought, “That looks like mini-Richard.”) Richard used to run the IV sound system before I volunteered two years ago. Stephen’s been running the video projector all last year and this year, so I’ve gotten to know him through working together on such things. I was delighted to learn that he actually wrote some programs to help make PowerPoint work better for our purposes. I love people who are geeky like me and write programs to make computers work better rather than lamenting what they do wrong. I also like his childish sense of adventure. He’ll do things just for fun, which is the way I like to be sometimes, as long as my introversion doesn’t override it. Most recently we were plotting how to get free data transfers to and from our pre-paid T-Mobile phones, for example by manipulating the AIM buddy list.

Slippey has been on the IV worship team for several years, and is currently the Large Group coordinator. He’s the one I take orders from when I set up the sound system, and he knows a little about sound himself. He was also one of IV’s pioneers of going barefoot around campus. (I started doing that all the time midway through the summer. Unfortunately, winter tends to put a damper on that.) He’s funny, and a good friend.

The IV worship team has featured Rachel and Becca (off and on), both of whom are infectious in their joyfulness. Rachel makes funny faces, and Becca is a globetrotter (I forget what the latest destination is). Allison is another interesting character. I was in a small group with Allison as a freshman last year, and now I ended up in the small group she’s co-leading this year with Johnny Arkansas… who is himself a character. There are lots of wonderful people at IV.

There are a bunch of other IV people I like, but most of my communication with people is done online through the ToO and YouthFire chat rooms. As an administrator of that chat server, part of my duty is to talk to people that need talking to, but mostly I talk to the gang of perfectionists that have emerged there in the past year. Jackie, Cher, Katie, Levi, and others all share, to my delight, a compulsion to type with impeccable spelling, grammar, capitalization, and punctuation. We can often be found correcting each other’s typos. But all pickiness aside, they’re also good friends.

Cher’s great. She first showed up in #aio as yet another lowercase junkie, but returned quite a bit later to YF as a changed person and soon joined the gang of perfect typists. I was intrigued by the fact that I managed to sustain some form of a conversation with her, since when most people try to talk to me it ends in silence after about three lines. Somehow our respective brands of oddity seem to mesh well, and we’ve been insulting… er, edifying each other ever since. I found it interesting that Julia and Kait both mentioned in their year-end notes that Cher was a big help to both of them, since for me it seems to be the other way around. I don’t doubt that she does that; it’s just that I always seem to be trying to help her with things. Perhaps some of what I’m putting in is coming out the other side to help others. That would be excellent, because I already feel quite gratified to be able to do this. Thank you for being receptive to my feeble ministrations, Cher. (See? People appreciate you no matter how you try to dissuade them.)

All Jackie ever does is tease me about Cher. Other than that, she’s a fine human being. And, incidentally, one that’s plotting to move to my neck of the woods, ostensibly because of an aunt of hers. Thankfully, I can see through her plot to torment me in person as well.

Kait and Julia only arrived on the chat scene in the past few months, but they provide me with enjoyment as well, particularly with their craziness. Julia, for instance is always “dying laughing” at anything and everything. It’s a wonder she’s survived this long. She’s also quite a tomboy, which is often amusing, especially when she’s pretending to get knocked up in fights. Unfortunately, Kait’s latest pastime seems to be trying to pair me up with Julia. (Don’t worry, I’m immune to girls.)

Well, that’s it for now. I hope this year will feature even better friends. (Not that I’m knocking the ones I have…)

I’m sure that was a boring paragraph, but it was fun for me, at least.

Cher: You sound so much like a little kid, at times…
Tim: It’s fun to have fun once in a while.
Tim: I refuse to kill off my inner child.

Having finished my last bit of schoolwork on Thursday, I was free of any responsibilities today. I decided to take my old textbooks from this quarter and last spring to the bookstore’s buyback place. I wasn’t in a hurry, so I decided to take a different route to school, namely… one I’d never been on before that I made up as I went along. I tried to avoid roads I’d been on before, to maximize the amusement and rate of information intake. It was fun to see what else was out there in the more country areas. There were plenty of farms and fewer houses than around home or toward the city. At one point I pondered whether to turn or not, but spied a big hill in the distance and decided to keep going. It was indeed a big hill, at least by local standards. It’s always fun when you can’t see what’s on the other side until you get to the top and then go flying down. This reminds me of last winter just after Christmas when we visited a few places on our way back from seeing my Ithaca grandparents. We took the cross-country route, which included lots of hilly roads for my mom’s enjoyment. Anyway, I found my way to Scottsville road, went south until I found the bridge across the river, and then came back north to arrive at RIT from the opposite direction from the usual.

In September for Biodiversity and Society class we went to the RIT Bird Observatory to see some bird banding. They have three sets of mist nets to catch birds in, and then they bring them back, measure them, and band them. I took a few pictures. Afterwards I looked up their web site. They have some pictures of how to distinguish older and younger birds of different species. In one of them I noticed that the fingernail of the person holding the bird had a lot of parallel ridges, more (or more pronounced) than I have on my own. Immediately the word “striated” popped into my head. I couldn’t place the meaning, so I looked it up. It turns out that that’s exactly the word for that type of formation. Somehow I unconsciously knew the proper word without knowing I knew it!

October 4th was the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik 1 , so the Imaging Science department had a Sputnik party. Unfortunately, it was at 3, right in the middle of class, but we got done about ten after so I could go over there. I missed the majority of it, but I did catch some of Roger Easton talking about his personal memories of Vanguard , the US response to Sputnik. It seems his father , in addition to being the inventor of GPS , was directly involved in the Vanguard project. On December 6, 1957, they tried to launch the TV3 satellite into orbit. The first stage guidance system failed 2 seconds after liftoff, and it crashed to the ground and exploded . However, the satellite itself fell clear of the explosion and continued functioning, though too badly damaged to be reused. Roger said that the next morning he woke up and his dad said, “Go look in the kitchen.” There in a cardboard box was the TV3 satellite itself. It now resides in the Smithsonian.

I think I multitask too well. I drove from RIT to the library yesterday, and on the way back I decided to avoid some of the traffic on Jefferson by taking some residential roads leading from 15A to Hylan. Just as I turned in there, Bible Story by Scott Krippayne came on the radio, so I started singing along. Shortly thereafter I got engrossed in checking the map to make sure I knew where I was going. Several minutes later when I was back on bigger roads I put down the map and discovered that I was still singing. Apparently I was too busy driving and checking the map to pay any attention to what my mouth was doing, so it kept right on going since I knew the song so well. I’ve done that plenty of times before; I just noticed it rather vividly today. The trouble is, I don’t think that’s a good thing. I think I do that in church sometimes too; letting my mind wander while still singing along. If I’m not paying attention, is it still worship? I don’t want to sing for the wrong reason…

The second of my two flights arrived at one of the gates for international arriving flights, which feeds right into the customs area. On the plane they had handed out cards to fill out your information and what items you were bringing into the country, which the people at the desks took and wrote on as they asked a few questions. Apparently the US doesn’t communicate too well with Canada. The guy said that they shouldn’t have even let me on the plane without my birth certificate, but I explained that I didn’t have it because I had to send it in with my passport application. They hadn’t seemed to have heard that under the new rules I only need the evidence of application to get back into the US (which I had).

The next stop was immigration, where the fun began. They check your ID and ask a bunch of questions to find out why you’re entering the country and how long you’re staying, in order to decide whether you’re actually allowed to be there. I gave them my flight plan, Melissa’s address (I didn’t have the phone number), and so on. Then she asked, “Have you ever been convicted of a crime?” I said no, and she turned to her computer to confirm it. After a minute she called her supervisor and talked to him for a few minutes out of earshot. Then she informed me that a Tim Peterson had on his record a robbery in Windsor, Ontario!

The birth date was the same, except that he was one year younger than me. Unfortunately, her computer didn’t give any physical details like hair color, eye color, etc., and it wouldn’t show a picture. (Apparently it should be able to, as her computer in the marine immigration office was able to do it.) She said she was pretty sure I was a different guy, but she had to check anyway. She got her supervisor again and had him go off to check my social security number. Unfortunately, he took approximately forever to do it. She sat around, I stood around, and we talked a little. Eventually another officer came by and started talking to her. They discussed various plans they had with co-workers, and we joked around and such for the next 15 minutes. I had mentioned earlier that Googling my name produced a number of different people with my name, and just for fun she did it herself. I’m apparently a lawyer, a poet, a singer, and a senator, among others. At some point I mentioned that I was actually the best man in the wedding, and that Melissa’s father was a pastor. They were even more guilt-ridden at that. “You better let me in!” I chided.

“So, what are you keeping this gentleman around for?” he had asked. She explained, of course, and eventually he went off to find the supervisor and see why it was taking so long. He eventually came back with the papers, and they sent me on my way. I picked up my suitcase, and exited the strategically-frosted glass doors to the public area. At this point, it had been at least an hour since the plane landed, and it was after 10. As I exited, I quickly spotted Melissa, who just as quickly spotted me. She, of course, asked what had taken so long. It had been so long that she eventually found someone official to ask about my whereabouts, not knowing if I was still in there or if I had perhaps not even gotten on the plane. The officer, presumably following protocol, made her describe me to him. (I had never met her before, so providing a description of me was slightly more difficult than ordinary.) “Um, dark curly hair, a little hair on his face… and he’s 6 foot 5.” “Oh, yeah, we’ve got him,” he immediately replied. “It’s an identity problem” is all they would tell her, though. (On my way out, he mentioned, “I talked to your… girlfriend? who’s waiting out there.” “I’m in her wedding,” I explained, “but I’m not… that.”)

My adventures as the “Border Bandit” (Melissa’s sister’s phrase) became the running joke of my stay there. My questionable past was brought up by everybody at various times, it seemed. Alas, “my reputation precedes me,” I once commented. Justin corrected me: “No, someone else’s reputation precedes you.”

That was an eventful start to my trip.

Maybe I’ll write more later; ask me if you want to hear about it.

I started OpenOffice today, and soon found that it was pegging my CPU. This had happened a previous time I started it, but I just killed it and didn’t investigate. I needed to get my paper written this time, so I investigated. I attached to the offending thread with strace, and saw that it was in a busy loop of connecting to port 631 (ipp) on localhost, sending a request, and immediately failing on a Broken Pipe. A quick check of /etc/services revealed that this port belongs to the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP). I have no printing installed on my machine, so this seemed strange, along with the fact that this is only the second time I’ve seen this happen. I found the process listening on that port with “lsof -i :631″. It turned out to be rpc.mountd, which I then recalled was also showing activity at the same time. This didn’t make sense, as this process helps with NFS, not printing. I hypothesized that this was one of the RPC protocols that allocated a random port at startup, and it just happened to pick that one this time around. (I recently had to reboot my machine.) I thought auto port numbers started at 1024, though, so I wasn’t sure. Regardless, I caused it to reallocate its port by invoking “/etc/rc.d/rc.nfsd restart” (Slackware). Sure enough, it picked a different port this time, and OpenOffice now works fine.

This was a rather strange coincidental conflict between two disparate programs that just happened to have both undesirable and noticable consqeuences. I’d say it’s the fault of both programs: RPC services should pick unreserved ports above 1024 to avoid collisions, and OpenOffice shouldn’t be busy-looping on a network connection.

After people started dividing up into projects, Becca came up to me and asked if we could get TV in this auditorium. It seems that a good friend of Val’s was going to be on the Jeopardy College Championship that night, and she wanted to watch. So, I got the TV going through the projector. We watched Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! on the big screen between 7 and 8 while we made sandwiches and cards. I handled running the TV and muting the commercials, since this is exactly what I do at home when we watch Jeopardy!. I know how long each commercial break runs, so I can time it on my watch and not have to worry about keeping an eye on the screen to run back and unmute it. Everyone cheered for Anna, but she didn’t end up winning, despite being the only one to get Final Jeopardy right.

Some people made the sandwiches, some people put them in individual zip-loc bags, and others ran to the store at various times to get supplies as needed. I found my niche as the bag packer. I took all the bagged sandwiches and packed them into grocery bags, counting them as I went. We ended up with 192 sandwiches, plus or minus a few, in approximately 10 bags.

After their service projects, everyone went to a meeting room in the dorms to eat pizza and play games. In quarters past, we’ve had the worship team do some songs there, in which case I handled the sound system. This time they didn’t plan anything big, so I wasn’t occupied setting up th sound. However, during the sandwich making they did decide to do some songs anyway, for which we didn’t have the lyrics to display at such short notice. So, they emailed me the words and I dumped them into an OpenOffice document. I didn’t really want to take the time to actually make slides (though I did do this on the fly in a previous quarter). I simply turned the background black, made the text big, put OpenOffice into full-screen mode, and removed any latent toolbars, to give a similar effect to the usual PowerPoint slides. I then scrolled around with the cursor as they sang the songs. It worked well enough, though not as polished as I’d prefer.

Stephen (who usually runs the PowerPoint) mentioned to me about the RIT Spring Festival. Somehow, perhaps by being an isolated commuter student, I’ve never heard anything official about this, neither this year nor in years past. (Somebody needs to do a better job of promoting it.) All I knew is that carnival rides appear in D lot every year with no explanation. Apparently it’s happening all Friday and Saturday, with rides, inflatables, and concerts at various times. The rides are all free, and Stephen said that was where he was headed afterward.

One I finished helping clean up the room, I figured I’d head over there and see what it was all about. There were 5 rides, a climbing wall, food, and miscellaneous carnival games. I’d never been on any rides like this before, and I wasn’t really intending to do so. I ran into Stephen and Richard (brothers) waiting in line for one of the rides. I watched them ride, and then saw Anti-Dan, Sarah White, and another girl I didn’t recognize. They invited me to join them to fill up the 4-person car on the Tornado. I supposed I’d come with them. Richard and Stephen got on as well, despite the former saying he wasn’t feeling quite as well after the previous spinning ride he’d been on. This was mainly a constant rotation, so it didn’t bother me much. While we were waiting for the ride to start, Dan and the other girl started talking about someone whose identity I didn’t catch. Sarah explained that the “he” in this conversation was a 3-foot-tall skeleton. I then realized that this was in fact Allison, whom I had seen on Facebook with her skeleton, and had subsequently emailed about to Carolita, a fellow skeleton-lover.

After that, we wandered into the line for the Octopus. Rich didn’t want to go on any more spinning rides, and on a related note, someone had recently thrown up on this ride. Stephen and I got on together. It proved to be rather cramped for my extra-long legs. Dave Ortiz and Dan got in the next car, followed by Sarah and Allison. The latter pair, they later said, had exactly the opposite problem, being short and therefore having too much room to slide around. The random rotations of this ride started to get to me, unlike the previous one, but I found that it was better if I relaxed and didn’t push with my legs against the car. Rich didn’t come, for precisely this reason.

We subsequently wandered around for a few minutes, and ended up talking near the ferris wheel. Stephen started asking me if I wanted to go on it, and edging toward the very short line to get on. I consented. He said it was scary because it was the most rickety of the rides. His point was reinforced while we were waiting. I saw one attendant looking up into the structure, and another talking to him. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I soon made out what was going on. The second guy pointed to a spot on the ground next to the contraption and held up a large metal nut, an inch or more in size. They proceeded to look around and try to find where it had come from. This wasn’t particularly encouraging, especially when they seemed to decide not to put us on one particular seat. But we got on anyway. Dave and Sarah got on the next seat. As we went around, Steve and I talked randomly about, among other things, the structural stability of the contraption, as it seemed to sway laterally slightly whenever we stopped at a certain point. It was just about 1 am at the time, which is when everything was to be shut down for the night. We stopped, and people were let off seat by seat. We thought that it was slightly strange that Dave had gotten on just after us and then got off first, leaving us to be the last to get off, but this wasn’t a big concern. We rotated to the point where we were just above and out of sight of the loading area. We continued chatting. Stephen jokingly suggested, “Everything’s shutting down — what if they leave us up here?” “We could probably climb down…” In a few minutes, we came down and were unloaded. The attendant said, “Sorry about that, guys.” “So you were planning on leaving us up there!” replied Stephen. We returned to the others, where Richard informed us, “I had to tell them you were still up there!” We laughed in amazement. He recounted:

Richard: “You know there’s people still up there?”
Attendant: “No, not until tomorrow.”
Richard: “No, I mean they’re up there right now! ”

“They had just put a lock on it to keep it from moving,” he finished. We hadn’t noticed anything was wrong; we were just sitting there admiring the view and jabbering away, waiting for our turn to get off. I also informed the gang of what I had seen before we got on, with the mysterious missing part. Maybe this isn’t the best ride to go on after all…

Wednesday we had another quiz. I checked over it before handing it in to make sure I hadn’t said anything he could mark me off for. He accepted my quiz with what I can only (inaccurately) describe as a posture saying “what are you up to this time, you troublemaker?” and proceeded to flip through it, which he didn’t do with anyone else’s quiz. He was obviously checking it over to see if I had made any errors by which he could declare triumph. Above one question I had written a note of clarification: “One assumes we’re talking about compressors here, though it doesn’t say…” When he read this, he laughed out loud, and then announced this fact to the rest of the class (for those who hadn’t finished yet). “One every quarter…” he muttered, which I could hear from my place in the second row. When he was done looking through my quiz, apparently without finding any errors, he gave me a grin and a thumbs-up. “Gotta watch you every minute…”

It’s fun being smart.