Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in jar's LiveJournal:

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Saturday, May 31st, 2008
10:51 pm	I just took an American Civic Literacy test here. I scored 83.3% and considered a few of my incorrect answers embarrassing. The average score for this month is 73.4%. My place relative to that feels about right to me. However, I was shocked to discover that the average score of the 7000 college seniors who took the test for the actual study was 54.2%! I can't say I have a bright view of our future if this is what passes for educated people. Ugh. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 28th, 2007
3:04 pm	houses are expensive So, in taking a close look at my finances of late, I'm coming to the conclusion that while I can scrape by as things are now, life would be much easier with some extra income.  So I'm starting to think about making a serious effort to rent out my apartment.  Most of you have probably already seen it, but I'll describe for those who haven't. 1 bedroom 2nd floor apartment in my house.  Located in Westford near the Chelmsford line.  Very convenient to route 3 and not bad to 495.  Contains living room, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom.  I'll post pictures if anyone is interested.  Plenty of off street parking available.  Plenty of storage space in the attic which is accessed through the apartment.  The utilities are shared with the main house, so I'm planning on including them in the rent.  Washer and dryer in the basement are presently only accessible through the house, but we can work something out for that.  Based on a quick search of apartments in the area, I think $700/month including heat, electricity, 20 channel super basic cable, and cable internet is a fair price. I'm looking to rent to someone I know, or a friend of a friend that a friend is willing to vouch for.  The reason for this is that while the apartment has its own entrance from exterior stairs, the other exit is stairs that come through my house.  For fire safety reasons it's probably necessary to leave the door to the house unlocked, hence the need for a trustworthy renter. Anyone interested, or know someone who might be?  I'm still in the process of putting up exterior siding, but all of the windows are in, so that shouldn't disturb anyone in the apartment.  I do have a bit of electrical and drywall work to do in the apartment, but if someone is interested in renting, I'll bump that up my priority list. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 1st, 2007
2:47 pm	Yesterday on HOUSE As some of you know, yesterday I closed on my first house. It's located at 12 Grove St in Westford, MA. A bunch of pictures I took are available here. It was originally a 3 bedroom ranch, but was later expanded by adding a 1 bedroom apartment upstairs. So, now it's a total of 4 bedrooms and 2 baths. I'm planning to make some extra money renting out the apartment, but I don't want to deal with renting to strangers. I have one potential renter coming to look at it tomorrow. If that doesn't happen, I'll put out more details. I'm very excited to be moving into my own place. It'll be a few weeks before I actually start sleeping there. My parents are coming up this weekend to see the house, help start the moving process, and help plan the renovation work this summer. The actual move will be happening the weekend of May 19th-20th. The only significant problems with the house is that due to shoddy gutters and lack of gutter cleaning, there is some water damage to siding and windows. So, this summer's project is to replace the windows and replace the rotting clapboard siding with vinyl. My father has generously agreed to come up for a week this summer to help get as much as possible done. The current plan is for them to be up July 13th - July 18th. I'd greatly appreciate any and all helpers that want to come by. The current plan is to work from early in the morning until noon or so, then take a break to avoid the heat, then work more in the evening. I'll have more details as it gets closer. I'll provide my endless gratitude, all the food you can eat, and all the homebrew you can drink (no drinking until after the work is done though :P) (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 2nd, 2006
12:41 pm	Accent Quiz What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Northeast   Judging by how you talk you are probably from north Jersey, New York City, Connecticut or Rhode Island. Chances are, if you are from New York City (and not those other places) people would probably be able to tell if they actually heard you speak. Philadelphia   The Inland North   The Midland   The South   Boston   The West   North Central   What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes Interestingly, Val says I do have a Philadelphia accent when I'm around my family, but not when I'm not. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 26th, 2006
12:56 am	it's done I've just finished Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Now I sleep. Current Mood: accomplished (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 12th, 2005
11:40 pm	concert quiz meme 1. Reply to this message telling me which of these 20 artists you have also seen. 2. Take the ones from my list that you have seen, and post them in your own LJ. 3. Add more until you have 20. 1. They Might Be Giants 2. Moxy Früvous 3. Martin Sexton 4. Ellis Paul 5. Ben Folds 6. Sister Hazel 7. Averi 8. Vance Gilbert 9. Eve 6 10. Flynn 11. Christopher Williams 12. Jim's Big Ego 13. The Low Life 14. Graham Colton Band 15. Willy Porter 16. Korn Mo 17. Chris Trapper 18. Jen Cohen 19. Kevin So 20. Muckafurgason Hopefully I didn't forget anyone important in my rather tired state. Current Mood: tired Current Music: Ellis Paul -- Alice's Champagne Palace (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 24th, 2005
5:56 pm	Jaerb!!1 I haven't posted on here in forever. Today I got some actually worthwhile news, so here we go. I got a job offer today from Venture Technologies. I'd say there's about a 90% chance I'm taking it. I'm not 100% glad about moving back to Mass, but otherwise, everything is great. The salary and benefits are pretty solid. Most importantly, the job is pretty much perfect for me. It fits excellently with my experience, both from JTAN and the MQP. I'd be doing a bunch of embedded systems software stuff, some internet/web tech stuff, and also increasing my expertise on the hardware side of things. The move has its plusses and minuses. On the plus side, I'll be closer to a bunch of my college friends. Moving away from parents house is somewhat on the plus, and somewhat on the minus. The plusses are independence and feeling like I've truly grown up. The downside is that I can't take advantage of the cheap place to live, and I'll be away from my family all the time. The clear down sides to moving are being farther from Val, and moving away from PADA. BUDA seems pretty organized, so hopefully I can get some ultimate action there. The increased distance from Val isn't that huge a deal. If it were going from a non distance relationship to a distance relationship, it'd be a big issue. Going from a 3 hour drive distance relationship to a 4 hour drive distance relationship is really just an inconvenience. Also, Val is down for the long weekend, which is pretty sweet. Current Mood: excited Current Music: Dispatch -- Two Coins (Hatch shell final live show) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, February 21st, 2004
12:26 am	Like this is a surprise to anyone at all Congratulations!! You're a smart sophisticated and beautiful martini!! What Drink Are You? brought to you by Quizilla (Comment on this)
Monday, February 2nd, 2004
6:50 pm	Guitar setup While playing guitar yesterday, I broke a string in the process of changing tunings. I then discovered that I was out of spare sets of strings. So, I stopped by Daddy's junky music in Shrewsbury to pick up some strings. I almost impulse-bought the Johnson J-Station amp modeler (mainly for use as a headphone amp), but the guy couldn't find the wall wart, so I dodged a bullet there. I got home and put on the new strings, which really needed to be done, broken string not-withstanding. The old strings had been on there for months, mainly because I've been too busy/lazy to play for a good long time. So, I was enjoying the new string feeling, when I noticed that the G-string at the 12th fret was almost half a semitone sharp of the harmonic. After borrowing some guitar repair books from my roommate Scott, I embarked on performing a full setup myself. It just doesn't seem worth paying a pro $30 to do a setup on a $150 guitar. After an hour or two of messing around, the action is lower, and the intonation is correct. Definitely worth the effort, though if I get a better/pricier guitar, I'll probably pay to have it done. Current Music: Queen -- Crazy Little Thing Called Love (live) (Comment on this)
6:21 pm	Useless meme post create your own visited states map Current Music: Don Cognoscenti -- Molly (Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 21st, 2004
1:56 pm	GRE == 0wn3d I went to Prometric Worcester today to take the GRE. Several hours and $115 later, I got an 800 Quantitative and 7x0 Qualitative, where I'm pretty sure x is 4 or 6. I sort of assumed that I'd get a printed slip of my unofficial scores, so I didn't make sure I'd memorized them. We'll see when I get the official ones. I don't know how I did on the Analytical Writing section, as those obviously aren't computer graded. I think I did OK, but we'll see. I asked the test center employee if I could use the Dvorak keymap for the writing session, but she'd never heard of it. Fortunately I still have most of my QWERTY speed, so it wasn't a big problem. Spending a few hours staring at a CRT doing 640x480 at 60Hz wasn't much fun, but I survived. It's strange, sometimes sitting down to a qwerty keyboard totally confounds me, and sometimes its no problem. Fortunately, this was one of the no problem times. Current Mood: accomplished (Comment on this)
Sunday, January 18th, 2004
12:10 pm	My life is rated NC-17. What is your life rated? Current Music: Ellis Paul -- Conversation with a Ghost (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 6th, 2004
5:52 pm	Child of the 80s While cleaning out my closet at my parents house, I found my Oakley jacket. You know the shiny iridescent windbreakers that were the thing back in the day. Reminded me of one of its contemporaries, the hypercolor Tshirt, which I never had. Anybody remember those? Current Mood: nostalgic (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 20th, 2003
2:18 am	So, I haven't updated this in forever, but a few people have been hassling me about it, so I figured why not. Just got back from an end of term party. I'm pretty tired, so this entry won't be very exciting, other than the fact that its my first one in well over a year. One more semester remaining of my undergraduate education; that's a scary concept. More updates to come, if I'm not lazy :P Current Mood: tired (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, September 2nd, 2002
3:03 pm	Well, I really haven't updated this in a long time. I've started to run into the problem of livejournal. Anything interesting I have to write about, the people who should know about it already do. So, I could fill this journal with inanities, but that would just bore everyone. I can't really talk about the interesting stuff going on, because its really not information for the whole of the net to know. Brief inanities update: I've been back at WPI for 2 weeks, and I'm loving it. I'm having good times being back around all my Worcester friends. My 2 classes are going reasonably well. My IQP is slow getting started, but I think it's also going to go ok. Brief interesting things summary: Life is complicated. Current Mood: mellow Current Music: my flatmate playing GTA3 (Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 13th, 2002
6:49 pm	Well, it took me even less time than I expected to become a livejournal slacker. Not much to report really, just passing time until it's time to go back to Worcester. Work has been going really slowly, because I'm just ready to leave, and can't really muster up any exitement for it. Mainly because all I have left to do is cleanup and refinement type stuff. I find I often have the problem that once the hard/interesting stuff on a project is done, I sorta lose interest. In good news, I made it to work and back today without being involved in an auto accident. I was mildly concerned, since my two previous accidents were on the 13th of june and the 13th of july. Of course, the tricky one will be the 13th of September, when I'm driving down for my cousin's wedding. I know superstition is silly, but if something had happened today, I would have found a way to get then that didn't involve me driving. 3 more days . . . (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, August 5th, 2002
9:26 pm	I completely forgot this in the previous post. I discovered this on my lunch break at work. It made me laugh and realize that I should never complain about my job. This guy has it far worse. Who? Why Stick Figure Warning Man of course. I like #17 the best I think. Current Mood: Bemused Current Music: Steppenwolf -- The Pusher (1 Comment |Comment on this)
8:36 pm	Meh, I'm really ready to move back to Worcester. Somehow, I'll tough out the two more weeks of work and lonelyness. Then I'll be back, and it'll be all good. At least my car stereo stuff came today. I'll be installing it tomorrow, since my dad is busy tonight, and I want him around to help out if necessary. So far I'm quite happy with Crutchfield's service. If the install goes well, and I find their instruction sheets satisfactory, I'll wholeheartedly recommend them. If you order more than $200 worth of stuff from then, and enter p5itj-t5gq3-b1ycz as the referral code, and you'll get $20 off. Please let me know if you do this, as they say it can only be 2 people per month. Current Mood: discontent Current Music: Jethro Tull -- Told Old to Rock and Roll (Too Young to Die) (Comment on this)
Saturday, August 3rd, 2002
11:05 pm	Today I had a good time at a picnic. I know this sounds really odd, but it was the annual picnic of my parents bowling league. I've been going to these for years. It used to be because I was a kid, and my parents too me with them. But now, I take my own car, and go because I have fun. Their league consists of 12 teams, each of which is a married couple. (Well, this isn't strictly true. My cousin Toni, and her fiancee Dan are in the league already. The married couple rule can be relaxed when they're short a team and don't have a married replacement.) The couples range in age from Dan and Toni, who are 29 and 21, up to a couple that are both retired, and are probably in their mid 70's. You'd think this wouldn't be a fun group to be around, but strangely, it is. And of course, how could you turn down free food ;). I played a bunch of volleyball, and swam in their pool. Good Times. In other news, Natalie may be visiting her sister in Philly and riding back to Worcester with me, which would be really cool. I've never spent 5 hours in a car all by myself, and I think it might be kinda weird. And Natalie is cool, which is also a plus. Current Mood: tired Current Music: Ben Folds -- Fred Jones Part 2 (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, August 2nd, 2002
6:40 pm	I got my car back. It appears to be in perfect condition once again. At least, I can't see anything that indicates the parts were replaced. I'm sure someone could figure it out, by checking serial numbers and such, but it seems the Musselman's did good work. If you need body work in SE PA, I'd recommend them. Fresh pictures are available here. My stereo stuff shipped this morning, so I should have a near infinite variety of tunes in the near future. Current Mood: chipper Current Music: Ben Folds Five -- Your Redneck Past (Comment on this)