Nerrrrrd

I’ve been working a lot on a research project for one of my Professors which has most recently involved a lot of compiling on an old Sun (we need the 16GB of memory available on it :-) ).  I spent literally two days trying to compile omnet++ and the INET suite.  I finally managed to get it working after some consultation with the #solaris channel on freenode.  Therein lies the problem.  I think I’ve just dragged myself into irc by finding the #hamradio channel.  I think ham radio is my nerdy guilty pleasure.  By idling in that channel I’m finding out all sorts of interesting things, and again reviving this latent desire I have to get a ham license.  For now, I may have to learn CW so I can use cwirc: http://users.skynet.be/ppc/cwirc/.

This semester has been interesting so far, but I’ve been focusing a little bit too much on my research at the expense of my other classes.  I suppose that means I like the field I’ve chosen, so its not too bad… but I need to put some more time into studying for  GEO and EE.

On the party watch:

Last week – Chris turned 21… boat party on lake austin!  Chris knows lots of pretty girls.  It was a good night.

This week – superhero party?  This might be interesting.

Twitter, Anyone?

So in our boredom arvind, caroline and I all got Twitter accounts.  Since I don’t have any real friends on twitter, I though I might see if there is anyone else who reads this blog and uses twitter.  For those of you not familiar with the Twitter application, its basically “micro blogging”.  You are expected to update once a day or more, but each update is only 140 characters.  Which sounds pretty boring, except that you can blog from your phone while you are out and about, which leads to very random interesting posts.  So far we know we will be cataloging all of Mike’s weird quotes, and probably professor quotes as well.  (which I already do, just on the side of my notes where no one else gets to enjoy them).  And what would blogging from your phone be without getting updates from your phone?  Needless to say, they’ve thought of that already, so the primary way to read Twitter (as well as write) is to do it via SMS text messages… although a web interface is also available for those of us that are… “texting challenged”.

So if any of that sounds interesting, you can find me under lurobi if you want to friend me.  Or I suppose you could find me under the same username if you didn’t want to friend me, but that would be kinda silly wouldn’t it.  You guys better friend me, because if I don’t find enough friends that use twitter, I might start militantly recruiting them so my life can be filled with short 140 char messages about random events.

Case of the Missing Keys

(or, How I Got Kicked Out of a Bar)

I went to meet my friend John at Tonic around 7pm and found him and one of his friends… lets call him Frankie, playing pool in the back room. The place was pretty chill, and mostly filled with the older to why-are-you-still-going-to-bars-youre-so-old crowd, most of whom were watching either the Spurs game or the Cowboys game on one of the many televisions in the place. The night started out fine with a couple of games of pool and a few drinks. Frankie started to become more and more withdrawn from John’s and my conversation, and I think he spent his spare time getting more drinks. As the night wore on, the older crowd left … presumably to go to bed by their 9pm bed times, and was replaced by a much younger (more attractive) crowd. At this point we moved our operation from the back room up to the bar so we could chat up the girls and listen to the band. By now Frankie was pretty drunk and sullen. One of the girls I was sitting next to and talking with had put her keys up on the bar, and wasn’t watching them too closely. Frankie thought it would be funny to slide her keys over behind his glass and see how long it took her notice. He kind of grinned at me when he did it, so I watched for a minute or two before it was clear she wouldn’t notice anytime soon, and then he put them back. I went out to dance around to the rock band playing on stage. John had somehow managed to befriend the band before they got up to play, so every once in a while he would dance on up to the stage and do silly things with the band. Pretty soon that same girl that was sitting next to me came up to me with her friends and asked if I had seen her keys. I figured Frankie had gotten to them again, so I told them to follow me as I looked for Frankie. We found Frankie by the bathrooms, and the girls jumped on him like … I don’t know, girls without keys I guess. Amidst his yells that he “didn’t have no ones *#&$ keys” they fished them out of his pockets, spun around to me and said “we are kicking him out”. I grabbed Frankie and headed for John who was dancing the night away on stage. I whispered to John “Frankie is getting kicked out, lets go”. Frankie is still enraged that the girls think he stole their keys, so John catches on pretty quick and we try to lead him out of the bar. I get one glance back at the girls talking to the barkeep who talks to a few tough looking bouncer guys, who all start staring at us and following us out to the parking lot. We get half way to John’s car before Frankie starts yelling at the bouncers for his right to stay at the bar and how he just found some keys on the floor and blah blah… Pretty soon John and I try to physically drag Frankie to his car, who has now developed a strong pride for some black belt he has in Judokarateboxing or something, and thinks he can beat up everyone in the bar. John and I are taking turns holding him back for about 3 seconds before we get shoved aside by 200lb Frankie. Pretty soon the bar sends out the mother of all bouncers, He is round like a bowling ball, and has to weigh 400lb, with a bald head and a big long beard. A bowling ball who rides a Harley judging from his black leather jacket with metal studs. But Mr. BowlingBall is also a smooth talker, and gets Frankie to back down after talking to him nicely and telling him that the cops are already on their way here. Finally we manage to get Frankie into the car, only to have him jump out and charge for the entrance to the bar before getting tackled by John and me. After a little more talking Frankie gets in John’s car and John drives him home. I hung around the bar a little while longer to make sure Frankie didn’t come back like he was threatening to. When John came back and assured me that Frankie wasn’t going anywhere and had calmed down, we decided to see if we could catch the rest of the band’s show… Only to find (cue dramatic music) we had been banned from the bar for a few weeks!

and that is how I solved the case of the missing keys!

In which Luke Describes Various Events that Transpired During Christmas Break

Good news everyone! After 3 days of planning, building, lifting, repairing and finally lowering, we managed to fix our pump! Water is again flowing to the Robison house, and in time for out News years party too! My mom’s birthday is new years eve, which is also the birthday of a long time family friend about her age as well, so when New Year’s rolls around we always end up planning a party and having lots of people over. This year it was at our house, and about 8 families came plus some kids our age for a total of around 30 people. We had a a great time, but didn’t end up setting up any firecrackers, since its been a pretty dry winter in San Antonio. In fact, I drove over to our old friends the Ramos’ during the night to say hi at their party, and on my way back I had to jump out of my car to help some people beat a grass fire away from an abandoned house! The next day I could see that the fire had burned about 2 acres around the house, but we stopped it about 10 feet away from the foundation. I noticed many charred spots around town in the days following New Years, the biggest was probably 20 Acres of solid black charred grass. It must have been quite a sight when it was on fire.

When I wasn’t working on water derricks or hosting parties at our house, I could generally be found out with friends around town. I went out to Shisha’s quite a few times with Eric and Matt, visited the Flying Saucer Bar once (still the best beer bar I’ve been to yet), and even met one of my old ITSA friends at a place called Tonic. Now, the night at Tonic was quite a story in it self, with mystery, intrigue (which is really just the same as mystery right?), and 400 pound bouncers. I call it “The Case of the Missing Keys”.