Wednesday, June 14, 2006

why do i get a funny feeling that the blogspot scene is dying?

i certainly have not helped. instead of keeping people up to date on my personal life or entertaining them somehow, i for some reason wrote nothing but silly vignettes about lazy people working at a hotel or a brunch restaurant or something like that. Unfortunately, there will probably be more of those.

i have gone to texas, with james, and that was fun. also, earlier, i went to florida for a conference. i went in a car with two Chinese people. one of them was the other driver, the other is my girlfriend whom i guess you know, but at any rate she can't drive. anyway, the other driver, he drives at like 95 mph the whole time, dodging in and out of tiny gaps between semis slamming on the brakes/gas every 12 or 13 seconds.

i on the other hand drive a reasonable 80 mph all the time and never pass anyone or cut anyone off, at least i think so. so Yong, the guy, and Jingping, both tell me, independently, that "if you go to China, you cannot drive there", because apparently everyone in China is a lunatic. their driving laws are opposite as the laws here. here, we have shoulders, and you aren't supposed to drive on those. in China, you drive on the shoulders if you feel like you aren't going fast enough. here, you're supposed to go with the flow of traffic. in China, you can't get anywhere unless you're constantly getting in front of the guy in front of you. here, if you cause an accident, it's your fault for being reckless. in China, it's the other guy's fault for not watching out. you should have a chinese person explain this to you. and you should talk to them about politics.

for three weeks, Jingping was gone home to china and i had to fend for myself. i went to a wedding and went to texas, and did some schooly things, kind of, part timeish.

okay, then last weekend i took Jingping down to tennessee to see Lisa's wedding and meet my sister and michael and other people. now, i expected Michael Murphy, aka Murf, aka Circuitry News, would be there, and I expected i'd finally get to sit down and talk about a robot with him. alas, he didn't show.

so, then we went to kingston springs, and i took jingping to see the famous Harpeth River, and the slave tunnel, and we walked up on the big tall ridge between the Narrows and looked down on the cow pastures.

now things seem back to normal schedule, as i'm here in the lab at 10:55 not working on this paper i should be working on. i just typed up a results section, now i need to read this discussion over... and i have one good new subject and two not good subjects, one of whom is myself. and the company that is supposed to be repairing my test lens frames for correcting refractive errors keeps saying the part is back ordered, so i ordered a whole new set of frames from them, and they won't get back to me about it, and then i find out it's the end of the fiscal year so i'm not supposed to be ordering anything at all anyway until july the 1st.

so there we go, all caught up, now blogspot can go back to dying.

7 comments:

  1. Are you calling me out? I wanted to talk robots with you, but my puppies were with me, and did not seem very invited, so I had to take them away. You can't just ditch puppies, you know.

    Perhaps we should meet in Nashville some evening for dinner and robots?

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  2. PS: my word verification for the above comment was "Pigss", which I thought was interesting due to one of your first songs of the week.

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  3. i understand, i understand. anyway, i guess i've been sort of busy so there's no time to actually work on the robot just yet.. but still, we need to talk about the future. i'll make it down there later this summer maybe..

    and have you learned to sing the pig song yet in mandarin? i can sing the first couple of lines, but can't remember the rest.

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  4. hey andrew it was great to see you after .... gosh two years or so.... it was great meeting jingping she seemed to be a really nice it was great meeting her finally.... also i watched a thing on the history channel about leonardo and he apparently invented the first robot, one was a knight that could stand up and sit down and move a little bit and the other was a small cart that could turn left or right. the cart and knight operated on a series of gears and pullies. the cart was powered by two coils that were wound up to power it but the robot had some other type of power source which might have been water or a series of weights... man leonardo was a friggin inovative man... simply amazing he made the diagrams for these in 1495...just blows my mind....good night....

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  5. hey travis, i have a nice picture of you from the wedding; but it's trapped on jingping's computer since i've lost my flashdrive. i'll send some pictures out one of these days soon..

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  6. hey andrew that would be great, you could send them through to my yahoo account. I hope all is well with you and jingping, you gotta let me know when you and murf build that robot cause i would like to see it work. I really do recommend checking out that feature on leonardos robot cause it was really cool cause it used some of the most simpleist technology to make it sit, stand, and wave.

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  7. Could you make a robot that poops? That's all I really care about. Thanks.

    And I like the vignettes. They made things in me laugh.

    I have pictures of you and Jing Ping feeding fish. Also, pictures of you two making out on a mechanical bull. There is a button, some where in the world that, when pressed, makes rats piss. Go frogs.

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