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My roommates and I are commissioning a painting. We wanted something utterly ridiculous that incorporated the three of us into the picture. Some ideas that were originally thrown around were:

• The three of us riding three boars like horses, fighting some sort of dragon. (This would be happening in outer space)
• All three of us riding one giant squid in the ocean
• The three of us, as firemen, saving kittens from a burning building

We eventually decided on the third. (I am still hopeful that someday we may also commission one of the others). The artist that we hired is our friend Jen’s little sister. She turned in a rough sketch last night, and I am pumped about it.

(We specifically requested that there be a person still in the building that we consciously did not rescue, because kittens are cuter.)

Since Wordpress (the software I use to run this blog) is written in PHP, it is very hackable (to me). After having to sort through hundreds of spam comments cluttering up my moderation queue, I decided to hack together a makeshift spam filter. Hopefully it’ll work as planned, but it might delete your legitimate comment, especially if you start talking about xanax or viagra. Anyway, just a heads up. In these beta moments, let me know if you make a comment on my blog so I can make sure it didn’t get deleted.

I realized today that I have too much money on my hands. I realized this because I found myself about to purchase five copies of Hydlide for $10. Hydlide is possibly among the top 10 worst games ever made, but that’s okay, since I wouldn’t be buying them to play, I’d be buying them to hang on my wall. I’m still gonna do it. But damn, there are bored children in Africa that need this game.

Fuck ‘em. I’m buying five copies of Hydlide for ten dollars.

I recently had the longest day I can remember having in several years. We woke up early to go disc golfing, which was my first time on an actual course. After that, Nick and I were scheduled to go to a Guitar Hero 2 release party at the Middle East. The day was supposed to be over after that. We were planning to head to bed early so we could wake up around 6am to go stand in line for a Wii, but then Jen and Ben gave us some intel that people were already lining up outside, so we upped the ante and went to wait in line too. All told, we didn’t end up sleeping until around 9am the next day (around 24 hours of being awake). This is not as easy as it was in college. I’m getting old.

Disc Golf
We found some free course at a park or something, which was really cool. The landscape was beautiful and interesting. Unfortunately, several of the “holes” were either near water or had you throw over a pond, and as a result we ended up throwing a lot of discs into the water. Most of these were retrievable, but we did end up losing two discs. My impression with these pond courses is that disc golf is trying to be like real golf, which seems like a bad idea. Golf balls are like 25 cents each, whereas discs are around 8-10 dollars. All told though, it was a good experience. I’m told that the pay courses are only 5 dollars or so, so it’s definitely a cheap and fun activity for an afternoon.

Guitar Hero 2 Release Party
My roommate Nick scored two tickets to this party at the Middle East in Central Square, which was awesome. In the upstairs they had a big high-def TV set up with Guitar Hero 2, where you could stand in line and play 2-player mode. Downstairs, there were a bunch of bands playing that did songs for the games. Our journey to the Middle East is documented on my Flickr account.

Wii
I promised myself I wasn’t going to camp out overnight for the Wii and then I did it anyway. It turned out to be pretty fun though. I was completely wrong about what this kind of thing would be like. The group was really organized. Instead of having a line in the traditional sense, they set up a list where you could sign yourself into the queue. After you did that, you were pretty much free to wander around, get food, or whatever (as long as you were physically present when the store opened). The people there were pretty cool. I was expecting a bunch of stereotypical nerds, but most of the people were pretty much like my roommates and me. Most people were pretty friendly. There were a surprising number of girls there. The three of us brought our DS’s, and we got a 7-player game of Mario Kart going with some people who had brought theirs too, which was awesome. We also got a pictochat going (where we drew a bunch of penises and then played Destructo).

My roommates and I have declared Stoop Day (October 5th) to be one of our apartment holidays. On Stoop Day, one traditionally drinks a 40 oz. bottle of malt liquor in a brown paper bag while sitting on the stoop in front of their apartment. The whooping of at passing ladies is encouraged, although whooping volume is not important. Cigars contribute to the feeling of celebration.

A song just came up that was tagged with both “music to slay a dragon to” and “songs to listen to when you riding to battle” [sic].

Tonight, Mikix and I tried an experiment. This experiment was inspired by the widely known property of helium that if you breathe it in, it changes the tone of your voice as you breathe it out. The explanation for this phenomenon that I learned is that your vocal chords vibrate differently in the medium of helium than they do in normal air, causing the change in your voice as helium passes over them.

The experiment was to surround a computer speaker in helium and see if it vibrated differently. We took a ziploc bag and placed the speaker in it, then fastened the zipper most of the way, leaving only enough room for the speaker’s chord to come out, and a little more leeway for the nozzle of our helium tank. I pressed out all the excess air of the bag before pumping helium into it. Then, Mikix played a couple of songs and we listened to the left speaker (inside the bag) and the right speaker (in normal air). The result of the experiment is that the speakers sounded exactly the same.

Hopefully, someone with a better knowledge of physics than I have can explain this.

Update on 09/27/2006:
My friend Kate has helpfully pointed me to the following article which explains the results of my experiment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium#Helium_Voice
From the article:

It is a common misconception that Helium’s effects on the voice are related to its density. The real explanation is slightly more complicated. Because Helium is monoatomic (earth’s atmosphere consists of over 95% diatomic molecules), its adiabatic index differs from that of air. This means that the speed of sound in helium is faster, and sound of the same frequency has a longer wavelength compared to in air. This difference results in the vibrational modes of the larynx corresponding to higher frequencies, and thus a higher pitched voice. An audio source which does not rely on a resonant air cavity (such as computer speaker) will not change pitch in a Helium atmosphere. If you took an orchestra to Jupiter (whose atmosphere is primarily Helium and Hydrogen), the winds would be out of tune but the strings would remain unchanged.

Today, my roommate Mikix and I headed down to Boston Common with a helium tank, a package of empty balloons, and a mission. That mission was to give away as many of the balloons as possible. Our estimate is that we gave away about 40 in total, which is not a bad chunk of the 55 or so we brought with us.

The very first balloon we inflated was given birth at our apartment, and we brought it with us on the T. Mikix named this one “Sir Balloonsalot” and we vowed that we would not give that one away. Unfortunately, a little girl was very insistant on getting a pink balloon and Sir Balloonsalot was the only inflated pink balloon we had at the time, so Mikix (begrudingly) gave it away.

Toward the end, business slowed down a bit so I started inhaling helium. The phrase “Hey kid, want a balloon?” sounds 10 times creepier than you think it does when said with a helium voice. I also discovered that Mikix doesn’t know how to breathe in helium from a balloon.

(Sir Balloonsalot is the pink one toward the bottom)

More photos

We have a tradition here known as “Beer O’Clock”, which is technically 4:00pm every Friday, when everyone has a beer.

This is possibly the best company name ever. I wonder how often people apply for jobs there.