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Gerritt's Homepage Classic - January 2004 gerritt.net THE NOT-QUITE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH January 31, 2004. 11:10 PM I think I've been spoiled by the two times I've been to the Ringling Bros and Barnum and Bailey's Circus, because tonight I just couldn't find the inspiration to be thrilled or even all that impressed by the George Carden International Shrine Circus. In Roanoke, every child for miles around couldn't keep away on a Saturday night, and they even let the kids down onto the floor during intermission to ride the elephants and ponies. Now, I say I wasn't all that impressed when comparing to the Ringling Bros. I mean direct comparisons, like a man lit on fire and shot across the arena from a cannon versus some guys in glow-in-the-dark jumpsuits spinning around each other on bungee trapezes. Or a spherical steel cage with five motorcycles riding all around in it versus one guy on a BMX bicycle doing stunts. Or a full live orchestra playing the score for the whole circus while the ring leader sings the introductions for each act, versus poorly dubbed tapes being played over a PA while the ring leader says advertisements for the souvenirs and light sticks for sale in the arena between acts. Its just a matter of quality. It was, however, a lot of fun to watch dangerous crazy antics being performed by other people, and anything with tigers is cool with me. This tiger trainer had wild blonde eighties hair and did his whole performance with heavy hair-band metal playing, occasionally stopping to head-bang during a solo. And, as always, clowns just aren't funny or in any way interesting. (Insert appropriate bad clown joke here.) Last night some of my friends and I did some research to develop a new theorem that I'll call the 'Gerritt Hypothesis'. The theorem: if, at any time during the course of normal college-age social interaction, one were to wish all women to leave an apartment, just break out the legos. NEED A PRESCRIPTION FOR THIS VIRUS January 28, 2004. 11:10 PM I would like to take a second to tell anyone who has ever created a purposely malicious email virus to get a life and go do something useful and high-paying with your amazing skills. These two most recent worms to invade the email servers of colleges and businesses around the country had one in every 12 emails sent as an infected file. Here, it was like the stone age, as the viruses crashed the Virginia Tech email server and left us unable to communicate like normal humans for two days straight. It was like we'd been transported back to 1990. Oh, it was awful. But those computer nerds figured out how to defeat the bug, and the email is back online and we're back to the 21st century. I think e-terrorism is the result of too many computer junkies with too much time and not enough life. Go outside or something. At least no one gets hurt, just annoyed. Oh, and if you're one of those people who opens your email attachments without checking to make sure its something you're expecting, please stop and think about it. It'll save the world a lot of trouble. THINK YOU KNOW BLACKSBURG? January 26, 2004. 11:50 PM UPDATE: It appears Gerritt's Homepage broke the story about the Safety Zone on I-81 (Jan 20th), and the Collegiate Times picked it up and wrote a cover story about it. Ah, so where do you go to get the news first? Gerritt's Homepage. Thanks for reading. Isn't it funny how sometimes you can just take a picture, not really expecting anything, and end up with something amazing? Its particularly great when it happens on a digital camera. Part of the annual Wesley Olympics this year found me creating a PowerPoint slide show with pictures from all around Blacksburg and Virginia Tech, mostly taken close-up or at crazy angles or something, and then the Olympians at Wesley were to try and name each place in the photos. But something interesting occurred. The pictures were really good. Even a bunch that weren't included in the presentation were very nice. Bret took about half of them, and I the other half, and then turned them into a PowerPoint show with 10 seconds allowed per picture to guess where it is. Almost every team got half of them right. One of my favorite images wasn't used in the presentation, but you can see it here, and can you guess where it is? I love the color of the sky in it. If you'd like to take a few minutes to view the PowerPoint file, download it here. And if you'd like the answers, well you'll have to wait. I'll upload all the pictures and the answer key later this week. FOLLOW THAT SONG January 23, 2004. 9:10 PM Do you ever notice how a song can follow you around? Usually its a song that you haven't heard in forever, or one that is particularly annoying, and it just seems to show up everywhere all at once. Tonight's song, for me, falls into both of those categories. "Indian Outlaw" by Tim McGraw is possibly one of the most catchy, annoying, offensive, interesting songs I've ever heard. Tonight, I heard it playing in Joe's Diner, then again in my car not an hour later. This after at least a year of having never heard it. My brother, Daryl, makes me CDs for Christmas each year called "Now That's What Daryl Calls Music," and strives to collect the worst possible songs he can find for each volume. "Indian Outlaw" was featured on the first one. Its really that bad. What's your song today? It doesn't have to be terribly annoying, just something that sticks in your head because you've heard it more than you usually do. Think about it. It'll come to you. BIG G GOES THE EXTRA MILE January 20, 2004. 11:45 PM  I spotted this great name for a trucking company on a semi driving I-81 last week. There was also another funny thing that I spotted on the drive down to Blacksburg: the section of 81 through Roanoke County has been tagged as a "Safety Enforcement Zone." The fines are doubled if you get pulled over, and there are big bright signs warning you about the new Safety Enforcement Zone. Everyone seemed sufficiently intimidated and drove less that 5 mph fast the whole time. Do you think this is a trap set by the Virginia State Troopers to catch us college kids on our way back to school? (The signs were installed within the past month.) Or was there a terrible accident along the road that prompted this? Maybe the police haven't made enough money this year and this was their way of making some extra funds from speeding tickets. NEW PICTURES from last week's trip to New York City are now online. EXCUSES EXCUSES January 17, 2004. 4:40 PM I haven't updated in awhile because my laptop has gone crazy again, and I've just been so wonderfully busy. I did write a bit on Daryl's Homepage when I was visiting in New York. (Pictures from that trip to be posted soon.) My winter break is now over, and I'm back in Blacksburg for the beginning of my final semester. As my last winter break as a student, it couldn't have been better. From Christmas at home with my family, to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, a quick trip to Newport News, cabin camping with the Sea Scouts for a weekend, three cold days in New York City, and now I've made the last long ride back down to school. And everywhere in between there were days to relax, spend time with friends, and wish the real world would stop getting closer. Yesterday I was offered a job in Maryland after graduation, which I plan to accept, and the way things are going I'll only have to go to class two days a week this semester. Its time to coast down through these last four months and make the most of my final days as a free man. Let's get started. HEY YOU! January 13, 2004. 9:40 AM Yesterday was spent mostly in my car, driving from here to Carderock Maryland for an interview and back and then a surprise trip down to northwest DC where Brian and Jessica live on the campus of American University. They're humble home is a tiny apartment provided to them because they're married and Jessica is in the ministry program at Wesley Seminary, part of AU. There's a few things I don't like about driving in The District (Washington DC), but overall its really not too bad. To start with, re-pave the roads now and then for crying out loud. And stop letting everyone park in the right lane of a two-lane road. Oh, and traffic circles work just fine without having stoplights in the middle of them. Weird. Otherwise, Northwest is a fine place, with lots to do and enough space that it doesn't feel like a city. I might live there if I get hired at Carderock, its just down the road. Otey, Melanie, and I are leaving this morning for New York City. Going up to see Daryl and the big city before we all have to go back to classes. I like New York, this will be a great trip. Just a few more days before my vacation is over, I have to stop being a nomad, and I'll stay put in Blacksburg for one more semester. SPECIAL TWO-DISC DELUXE COLLECTORS BONUS EDITION January 9, 2004. 3:40 PM I just got done watching the bonus features from the Pirates of the Caribbean DVD. There's a lot of good stuff on it, including commentary and extra footage that didn't make it to the final cut. As usual, the only thing that was interesting was the behind the scenes and pre-production shots, which show the actors as real people and the raw film before the computers get to it. Deleted scenes are usually a bust, and sometimes the bloopers and outtakes are worth watching, but an entire second DVD filled with 'The Diary of a Pirate' and '19 Deleted and Alternate Scenes' is hardly worth paying money for. I just want the movie. But sometimes on a cold, snowy afternoon during winter break, with some downtime between my numerous travels, I put in the Bonus Features disc for some movie and hope its worth watching. Once again let down, I now finish up my packing for the weekend of cabin camping with the Sea Scouts and wish I'd watched The Simpsons or Looney Tunes on DVD instead. NEWPORT NEWS FLASH January 7, 2004. 11:15 PM I'm writing now from my hotel suite on the fourth floor of the Omni Hotel Newport News. The employment people at Northrop-Grumman Newport News were nice enough to pay for my hotel and travel expenses since I interviewed with them this afternoon. My interview went very well, although I admit they're not my first choice for places to work. The group that interviewed me is working on the power plant system for CVN 21, the first in a line of next-generation aircraft carriers due out in about 10 years. CVN 21 will be about the same size as the Nimitz class, just with more power and a smaller superstructure than the older design. Its a nice job, and a nice place to live. I'll have to see who else offers and whether I'll want to relocate or not. I met up with Alex, who is stationed at Norfolk, and went out for seafood with him and his friend Katz. Job interviewing isn't so bad when they pay for everything and treat you real nice. NEW PICTURE PAGES: Christmas 2003 and Little Cabin in Colorado Roadtrip 2004 TAKE A LITTLE TRIP January 5, 2004. 3:45 PM I'm home from Colorado, and back to updating. It's only been a week, did you miss me? I left last Monday morning and drove out to the country's tallest mountains, where my mom and Garry just bought a house. Our drive out was uneventful for the most part, with nice weather and good music to guide us through the nation's heartland at 75 mph. Once in Colorado we hit our only mountains since West Virginia, and the little VW Jetta easily climbed the pass linking Interstate 70 to the opposite side of the Continental Divide, and to my mom's future home. Her town is called Park City, which makes me laugh because there's only about 12 houses in the entire "city". Its just up the hill from Alma, which claims to have the "USA's highest saloon". Their cabin sits amid an old mining village, much of which is abandoned, and a national forest. At well over 10,000 feet above sea level, the lungs of a sea-faring Marylander like myself were working overtime, and I spent a lot of the week feeling pretty sick. To top it off, the temperatures ranged from a high of about 20 to a low of negative something I don't want to think about. I'm glad they had propane heat and featherbeds. It was quite beautiful when it first started to snow, and after a day's visit to the nearby Breckenridge ski resort, I began to realize why people like it there so much. Melanie and I didn't ski, but went shopping and toured the town instead, and had more fun than we would have had on the slopes for sure. After another full day of snow, we decided it would be to our advantage to get a hotel in Denver, two hours away, the night before our flight home. My mom's flight was cancelled due to heavy snow at her layover point in Chicago, and Melanie and I got delayed at our layover in Milwaukee, but made it home safely. Daryl's direct flight to NYC was on time. There's a lot more to tell, and about 90 pictures to post, so keep watching for updates over the next few days. Happy New Year to all you readers, thanks for checking in. 1600 MILES OVER, ONE MILE UP December 29, 2003. 6:45 AM I've been assigned the task of transporting one VW Jetta and one large dog across the country. How I get myself into this kind of thing I'll never know, but adventure always lurks around the next corner. Garry, my mom's boyfriend, has moved out to Colorado to a small nearly-abandoned mining town in the heart of the Rockies, and she'll be moving out there with him in June. As part of the moving process, Garry needed a way to get his car and his dog, Apollo, to their place. So, for only the small fee of a plane ticket home, I offered to drive the Jetta and the slobber machine out west. Melanie has offered to come with me to make the trip a little easier, and we're set to leave this morning. We'll be getting there on New Year's eve, and we'll be watching Dick Clark counting it down at 10 PM this year. Our return flight is on the 4th, and by then I should have a ton of pictures to sort through. Its about time to hit the road, I shall return to updating in a week. Have a Happy New Year y'all. Aaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwww. . . FREE VACATION!! |
