The Standard (B)Error

Nevada

2009-01-11T20:47:00.001-08:00

SSL24195, originally uploaded by Garret in Deutschland.

Well well well....the blog has been revived! In preparation for my trip to Germany, I will be posting on this more regularly. Here is a post from my new flickr account...awesome. It´s the desert in Nevada. Sweet.

2007-07-10T22:13:00.001-07:00

Well, everyone (and by everyone I mean Amber--but at least she takes the time to check my blog--thanks for nothing all the rest of you netizens) seems to be clamoring for a new post, so I thought I would do something quick here before I head to bed. My mother's birthday was this past Monday and both her and my father came out to San Francisco for a visit. In celebration of her birthday, we decided to treat ourselves to dinner at a Brazilian Churrascaria. This is a type of all-you-can-eat meat buffet style restaurant where freshly cooked meat is brought straight from the grill to the table on large skewers. The place we went to in San Francisco is called Espetus and you can check out the website here. I highly recommend it. The food was spectacular and, unfortunately, had a pricetag to match ($150 for the three of us, plus tip) Anyway, our waiter snagged the following photo of us at some point between the the beef sirloin and the Parmesan pork. Don't we just look so happy and satiated?

At the pool...

2007-06-14T12:03:00.000-07:00

Avery...and yes, I mobile posted this from my cell phone as I came out of the locker room. Sweetness.

Piled High and Deep

2007-06-14T08:47:00.000-07:00

So there's this great online comic strip I read regularly called "PHD Comics"...you can find it here. It's made by PhD students, for PhD students, so its humor is often clever and incisive while at the same time being depressingly close to the actualy reality of graduate student life. I've posted below two of the most recent entries that I found particularly enjoyable/depressing. Enjoy. And then empathize. (Click on the images to enlarge)

iCrash

2007-06-07T09:05:00.000-07:00

5/24/07 11:00AM -- Garret closes his Macbook Pro and puts it to sleep before his flight to Texas

5/24/07 10:00PM -- Garret opens his Macbook Pro expecting a capable, functioning notebook computer

5/24/07 10:01PM -- Garret fearfully realizes his Macbook Pro has no intention of functioning normally and has, for lack of a better word, suffered a rather horrible iCrash.

My range of emotions proceeded as follows:

Anger-Anger-Fear-Anger-Despair-Despair-Despair-Anger-Fear-Fear-Fear-How much will this cost me?

(Incidentally, this emotional procession perfectly parallels how I feel every time I catch a glimpse of Dick Cheney on television. Odd, that.)

As the above chronology details, I have been sans computer for about a week now, after my Macbook Pro suffered a rather disturbing hard drive goof up last Thursday. Fortunately, I keep a back up of my data just for instances such as these. Even better, it appears the fault was not a hardware issue and a simple format and reinstall of the operating system fixed things right up. However, I managed to lose my most recent modifications to the final blog in the Questions series, so it will be a bit longer before I can post it. I promise I'll work quickly.

Since I can't write a blog without at least some political commentary, and since we are on the subject of iProducts, here is a little video from several months ago that is as funny today as it was then. If you haven't seen it, you are in a for a treat. If you have, well watch it again--it's still funny as hell.

She Fought The Line

2007-05-23T22:10:00.000-07:00

...and the line won.

Today, absurdist political hack/appointee Monica Goodling testified before Congress on her role in the politically motivated firings of several U.S. Attorneys who, contrary to Bush administration fiat, declined to pursue charges against subjects considered political "enemies" of the conservative machine.

In a surprising (at least to me) move, Ms. Goodling commented that she believed she had "crossed the line" in relation to these firings (I'll refrain, against my natural inclinations, from using this opportunity to make a Bush-cocaine correlation joke). I felt it was a rather startling revelation, but considering Ms. Goodling has a B.A. from Messiah University and a law "degree" from televangelist Pat Robertson's oh-so-fun Regent University (hold your snickering), I suppose "revelations" should not be an unexpected occurrence.

For those with interest, here is the video of her testimony:

While she waffles about whether or not she actually broke the law, one gets the distinct feeling that her heart isn't really in the fight. Perhaps a bit of remorse? A twinge of regret? All together, I suppose we should take comfort in the fact that her well-purchased "Christian" education managed to endow her with some form of moral/ethical compass, no matter how adled it may be. Too bad it couldn't prevent her from actually breaking the law in the first place. I suppose some miracles are just too much to ask for.

Still Hungary...

2007-05-18T07:47:00.000-07:00

One of the great things about Europe is that everything is so CLOSE. Relatively. While in Munich, I was able to sneak off to Budapest for a weekend to visit a good friend currently living there (a seven hour train ride--Amber you owe me). I didn't have my Canon Rebel (see comments on memory card below), but I did have my trusty Kodak V570 snapshot camera. I snagged these stills using it.

A Case Of The Münchies

2007-05-18T07:39:00.000-07:00

My recent trip to Munich, Germany (work-related) resulted in some fairly nice photos. I dragged along my Canon Rebel XT camera, with which I was able to snap some nice shots...that is, until the memory card crashed and the damn thing locked up. Up until that point, it was was great. Below are some of the stills I snapped around the München area. Click on the photo for a larger image. At some point I might put captions. Maybe.

I Used To Be A Myspace Kid

2007-05-17T18:25:00.001-07:00

But then I found blogspot. More control. More style. More substance. I'm hoping this thing kicks off with a bang--of course, that means posting more than once a month, which is, let's face it, not likely to happen. But what the hell, I'll give it a go. Stay tuned.