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Back to gerritt.net IN PEE ARE February 29, 2004. 1:50 PM In case you don't listen to National Public Radio very often, you're missing out on a great program that features some of the best upcoming music called Mountain Stage. Last week I made the two-hour trek out to Charleston, WV, to be part of a live taping of the show. Bret and Sarah H. made the trip with me, originally planning the trip because we wanted to see Guster play. As it turned out, though, Guster was the last of five bands featured on the Mountain Stage taping that day, all of which were interesting and exciting to watch. The host of the show, Larry Groce, gives a short bio of each of the bands and then they play three or four songs taped in front of the live audience. Guster played an acoustic set complete with a banjo and two guitars, and all the bands came out at the end for a big finale jam together. The program will air in about six weeks on NPR stations all around the country, so check it out sometime. If you're in SW Virginia you can tune in 89.1 or 89.3 at 4 PM on Sundays to hear the program. You just might hear me cheering on the recording. Seeing Guster play their short acoustic set just made me anxious for tomorrow night when I have tickets to see them play here at Tech. That should be a lot of fun. . . . BUT MY HORSES KEPT DROWNING February 26, 2004. 11:50 PM Thanks for all of your positive comments, and thanks for making the last two days the best ever in gerritt.net history! Over 75 of you checked it out, and I think that's great. Thanks again. Just when you thought curling was the silliest game you'd ever see, let me introduce you to innertube waterpolo (photos courtesy of TSPN). Yes, you heard that right. Take the strategy of basketball, the speed of soccer, the eye-of-the-tiger focus of baseball and the physical prowess of football, and trade them all in for a silly hat, an inner tube, and forty minutes of craziness. Teams of seven: two defense, two forwards, two mid-poolers, and a goalie, float around on truck tires and try to throw a normal yellow waterpolo ball into a big goal. Its a game dreamed up by someone who likes water, I guess, but who also likes humiliating hats and chafing. And yes, it is legal to flip someone out of their tube as long as they have possession of the ball. I play for the Wesley Foundation intramural team, men's and co-rec, and both teams are practiced well and predicted for a strong showing in the post-season starting next week. Two years ago our women's team won the championship of the university. Its a game where no one really has the chance to practice, and no one comes in with any prior experience, so the game revolves almost completely on your dedication and strategy, both of which Wesley is strong in. We're out to win. Don't forget it. See you in the playoffs. A WORLD OF CHANGE February 25, 2004. 12:01 AM Hello and welcome to the new gerritt.net. Look around, let me know if you find any empty links and such, and enjoy. There's more to come, and more fun to be had. This journal celebrates nine months of writing in a few weeks, and the positive response to it from my friends and family has made me more and more dedicated. It may not be the most interesting or the funniest thing on the internet, but there's just something that draws us to reading about the world through the eyes of our friends. I don't know what it is, but you'll find it here. Stay tuned for my usual updates, 3-4 times a week at least, and keep watching for more pictures! Speaking of which, new pictures are now online from my long weekend in New Orleans (written about in the journal Feb 22 and 23). Now sit back, relax, and watch the world unfold through the eyes of Gerritt. TO THE PORTHOLE. . . TO THE BULKHEAD February 23, 2004. 4:50 PM Assembling a ship shares almost no similarities with the robotic, precise auto assembly lines you see in Ford commercials. There are no welding robots, no conveyor belts, and no men in white smocks and hardhats rolling off a thousand aircraft carriers a day. For a ship, each piece is intricately designed, measured, and crafted mostly by hand to precise detail. A medium sized ship takes four years to build, and even then it may not be finished until years later at sea. The engine room of a typical Navy ship has over 10,000 different parts, each of which must be custom-made and assembled, then attached to the machinery room segment, which is then welded to the other chunks of the ship, and eventually the pieces form a floating war machine. Its like if you were playing with legos, but had to craft each piece yourself before you could even start playing. In New Orleans, Northrop Grumman took myself and the members of VT SNAME on a tour of their facility, showing us all the stages of ship construction. We got to see the nearly complete LPD 17 Amphibious Transport Dock, the largest drydock in the country, and inside that drydock the new 900-foot tanker being built for Polar Oil. Its all so overwhelming, and its great to think I'll be a part of it. Two nights in New Orleans, on the weekend before Mardi Gras, is an experience I'll never forget. It is a place that overwhelms your senses, gets under your skin and into your brain, and takes absurdity to a new level. From the seemingly never-ending chain of parades, the strings of plastic beads hanging on everything, strip clubs, bars, two-dollar bathrooms and free live music, people sleeping in their cars, to expensive restaurants, balconies full of rich people in suits, overpriced hotels, paddleboat cruises and casinos. Our hotel was roughly five blocks from the start of Bourbon Street, where it intersects Canal Street. From there, walk down Bourbon and you'll be clobbered with a thousand different sights, sounds, smells, and tastes, and the streets begin to fill at about 9 PM. From then on, all night, the party gets louder, smellier, pushier, and drunker than any place on the planet. In one instance we were forced through a crowd so thick that it did no good to try to walk, just push and slide as you move. Its very uncomfortable, but no one there is expecting comfort. The crowd on the street is 75% male, and constantly shouting for women to take their clothes off. There are men dressed as women, women proving to everyone that they're women, men shouting and throwing strings of beads, strippers, prostitutes, gay prostitutes, and everything in between. There are people standing in the streets carrying posterboards telling everyone to repent and find Jesus, there are people standing in the street holding posterboards advertising 'live music: no cover', people holding posterboards telling where the $2 bathrooms are, and posterboards offering cheap beer. You can duck into a less crowded place and listen to some great music, or save money and just stand on the street and people watch. Seemingly everyone is there because they want to be watched, and for those of us who come to watch, it is the best free freak show you'll ever experience. I had fun, although I spent most of the time wishing there were about a quarter as many people there. Saturday morning a few of us walked down to have breakfast at a wonderful buffet in the heart of the previous night's madness on Bourbon Street. The city's sanitary workers were out in full force, hosing down the sticky sidewalks and trying in vain to remove the huge amount of trash created by one night of partying. The pungent vomit-liquor-BO-trash smell still lingered as we past over sewer drains, but a warm gulf-coast breeze soon replaced it as we sat down for our last morning in New Orleans. Some of our group never made it back to the hotel, choosing instead to stay with friends in the city, prompting us to leave without them when they didn't return the next day. Luckily, someone had driven separately from the bus and opted to stay another night, giving them a safe ride home. New Orleans is an interesting place, and this trip was a great opportunity to see the Mardi Gras scene and the city. I'll be back. My next trip to the Big Easy will hopefully be off-peak, when the jazz scene is hot and the French Quarter is a little more chill. gerritt.net arrives in two days. IMPOSSIBLE February 22, 2004. 1:30 PM It was fourteen hours in a dull, noisy coach bus before the Virginia Tech SNAME members finally arrived in Biloxi, Mississippi Wednesday night. Arriving at our hotel that night found us each staggering off the bus and staring across the street at the impressive entrance to that night's playplace: The Beau Rivage casino. Having played poker and watched Rounders on the long bus ride, we were ready to take a risk or two that night. The 15 or so of us who are of-age wandered over through the colorful facade and into the lights, noise, wealth, and confusion that is a casino. This being my first visit to a house of gambling, I found myself in awe of the entire way of life that revolves around gaming. If you're not smart or have little self-control, this is a very good way to lose lots and lots of money. There are games where luck is all there is (can you believe they have a War table?), where skill is involved to beat your dealer (6-deck Blackjack), and where the only real skill is to outplay your opponents (Poker). Our group had its share of winners, losers, big winners, and big losers. I won a bit playing Blackjack, and left with small winnings that I spent on a breakfast buffet in New Orleans. The next morning found us up with only the engineer's required four hours of sleep, and on the bus headed east along the exciting Mississippi gulf coast. Empty buildings, salt swamps, shrimp boats, causeways, and brown trees dot the landscape along this horrid part of the coast, the only attempts at improvement were the dots of fancy hotels and casinos that encourage visitors to come in and stay in. We arrived at our destination shortly, Northrop- Grumman Ship System's Ingalls shipyard, in Pascagoula, MS. Donning hardhats, eye protection, and ear plugs, our crew was given a full tour of the facility, from the sheet steel arriving by truck and train to the floating ships painted Navy gray. Steel is welded together in a huge shop and pieces are assembled and moved out, getting progressively closer to the water as they near completion. This facility is the only shipyard in the country that was built and designed specifically to construct ships. Our tour took us out to their drydock launching facility, into the bowels of the nearly-complete newbuild destroyer DDG 93, and into the shops, where they bend and weld steel two inches thick, bend 180 degree turns into titanium pipes as big around as your head, and are just generally proud of their work. This is also the facility that landed the contract for the repairs for the USS Cole, the destroyer that was attacked by a suicide bomb boat a few years ago. The tour was fulfilling, and the tired VT SNAME crew crawled back into the bus and pulled away, headed for New Orleans and the excitement of Mardi Gras. Read about it tomorrow. WHAT AM I RUNNING FROM? February 16, 2004. 8:05 PM A nice four-day weekend back home in Maryland, two days here in the 'burg, then I'm off again Wednesday morn! This time I'm traveling to the gulf coast of Mississippi and Louisiana with SNAME (remember SNAME?) to tour two shipyards and spend some time in New Orleans. I cannot assure you that I'll be able to update this journal while I'm on the road, but rest assured there will be lots of entries to follow the trip. Somehow these tours got scheduled on the weekend before Mardi Gras, which is Tuesday the 24th, and coincidentally the day before the launch of the new gerritt.net website! Maybe I'll have some great pictures to put up as the first ever installment of gerritt.net picture pages. Of course, all the old ones will be there too, along with a fancy new color scheme and layout. Following my adventures in New Orleans, I have two weeks until I leave again for Wesley Singers Tour 2004 (remember Tour 2002 and 2003?) This time we're headed south to my homeland, the fine peninsula state we call Florida. And we're stopping everywhere in between. Don't worry, though, I'll keep you updated whenever and wherever I can, just keep checking. And prepare yourself for gerritt.net next week! WEEEEEEEEE-HOOOOOOOOOO February 12, 2004. 8:25 PM I think I've found my calling. All this time focusing on Ocean Engineering when all I think I'm meant to do is whoop. That's right, I'm now focusing my energy on being one of those guys who shouts, hoots, yells, and makes all kinds of good-old-boy noises in the background of the chorus of country songs. (See: "Friends in Low Places," or the radio version of "I'm Gonna Miss Her.") I'd love more than anything to be in the music business, but I'm not quite good enough to be a singer or a writer, so I think I'll just be a hollerer. I've been practicing my yee-ha, and I'm just about ready. After graduation I think I'll head to Nashville and see about sitting in on an audition, or maybe I could be an understudy for a year or so before I try to make the big time. I really think I have a future in hollerin'. Does anyone know Toby Keith's agent? MOVE YO ASSETS February 10, 2004. 11:25 PM Part of our annual traditions in the Wesley Foundation is the Secret Valentine game, played during the week leading up to Valentine's Day. We all are randomly assigned someone of the opposite sex to leave gifts and clues for all week and then on Sunday we try to guess who they were. Well, someone has taken the time to not only make herself a new IM screenname (Otey's Valentine), but also to use his face cutout for an online dance video. That boy can really cut a rug! But we knew that before the video was made. Construction on gerritt.net is underway, and soon to be delivered! Until then, my pictures from Midwinters, the Lego night, and the Where In The World game are online and looking normal. The new website will look similar to this one, but with new colors, a modified layout, and a whole disc of bonus features! So stop by again soon, and be on the lookout for gerritt.net, coming February 25! EVIL HAS ARRIVED IN THIS KITCHEN! February 8, 2004. 11:55 PM I just got done watching The Brak Show, part of Cartoon Network's 'Adult Swim' programming. I'm an avid fan of cartoons, especially ones aimed at people my age. The Brak Show was off the air for awhile, but its back now, making me laugh just like before. I also enjoy the occasional Looney Toons episode from my DVD collection that I got for Christmas. Always makes me laugh. A great DVD for people with a short attention span. Last night was the annual Midwinter's Dance here on campus. The band they hired flew here from L.A. last night, and flew right back this morning for their performance on the Grammys. Turns out the crazy rock-funk band from Atlanta who played here last night, Whild Peach, is also the band who backs up the hip-hop duo Outkast. They performed on the Grammys this evening while Outkast took home three awards: Album of the Year, Best Urban/Alternative Performance, and Best Rap Album. I happen to believe that the Grammy Awards aren't very representative of good music, let alone talented musicians or well-made music. If they were, then many of the winners wouldn't be the bands you hear on popular radio or see on MTV. I have posted my pictures from Midwinters last night, but like my last two picture pages, they didn't download properly and ended up fuzzy and distorted in some way. This will be fixed as soon as I get my new gerritt.net website. Coming soon. GERRITT.NET COMING SOON, BUT NOT TRYING TOO HARD February 5, 2004. 11:55 PM I have had an overwhelming majority of votes for my new domain name to be gerritt.net. I will be buying that name soon, and phasing in all my pictures and web pages over the next few weeks. I will let you know when the purchase and the re-design has occured, and you can watch the progress as I move over to a new server. Thanks for your votes. Newest entry on the list of musicians who try to hard: The Darkness. They swear there's no irony or "taking the piss out of heavy metal." (That's Brit-talk for making fun.) But somehow I don't think anyone, at least anyone in the US, can take them seriously. Especially considering Also on the people who try to hard list is this guy Tom Arico. It seems our friend Tom, "The Republican Rock Star," has made a name for himself by having college radio stations play his song "Baby on the Way" and see how long someone can listen to it and keep a straight face. I dare you to try. Go to his "Baby on the Way" listening contest webpage to read his interpretation of why college radio stations are doing this contest and to listen to the song in Real Audio format. Oh you'll laugh. Poor guy. CLIP SHOW February 3, 2004. 9:10 AM My last batch of pictures got weird and screwed up on my bravepages server, so I've decided not to put it off anymore. I'm buying my own domain name. I need your help, though. Which of these available dot-coms should I buy? - gerritt.net - gelang.net or gelang.org - g-money.org - gerrittshomepage.com or gerrittshomepage.net My Super Bowl MVP was New England Patriots linebacker Matt Chatham. He's the one who tackled the half-time streaker and laid him out flat so that the police could apprehend him. Not in my country, buddy. BOOYA!! Yesterday was Groundhog's Day. The world's weirdest and most celebrated rodent holiday. Unfortunately, federal government workers don't get a paid holiday for it. Yet. The e-mail virus has been cleared up, and we're on our way back to reading the emails that were supposed to be sent a week ago. We recently decided to subscribe to cable TV here in my apartment, after 4 months of debating and trying to figure whether cable or satellite is better. Much to our chagrin, our new 'cable TV' service is just a feed from a Direct TV satellite dish somewhere in Blacksburg, for which we're paying slightly more per month than we would for satellite. At least their ethernet is fast. Screw-ups of the week: Janet Jackson, Howard Dean, and Marcus Vick. |
