our hotel in luxor

http://www.luxorhappyland.com/

plans plans plans

I wake up this morning with an unsettled stomach from last night. (Happy Birthday, Patrick!) Yesterday was a great day and we got a lot of stuff done. I still have an 8-10 page paper to write that I haven't yet started, but we made a lot of progress in planning out things that need to be done between now and graduation.

• Watching a New York Knicks game (NYC)
  This will be done Wednesday by leaving immediately after a meeting to catch the 4:24 Metro-North train to New York. Go Cavs!
• Watching a New York Yankees game (NYC)
  Done last year. Might go again in May after classes end.
• Watching a New York Mets game (NYC)
  Tickets booked for April 13th.
• Watching a Red Sox Game (Boston)
  Discussion in progress with my peeps in Boston
• Performance at Sprague Hall (NYC)
  Done. Although I wouldn't mind another one.
• Performance at Woolsey Hall (NYC)
  Missed out on this one. I'm out of town the weekend of the last performance of the year (April 26).
• Yale Repertory Theater (New Haven)
  Need to organize a group, but they're around till May 16th, so this is an after-classes-end activity.
• Shubert Theater (New Haven)
  Might check out Hairspray when it comes to town later this year.
• Yale Symphony Orchestra (New Haven)
  Planning on attending the free concert the weekend of commencement.
• Visiting random Yale buildings (New Haven)
  Will do some random Friday with Klee?
• Group outing to Chinatown (NYC)
  Will be combined with the Mets game, and all other excursions to NYC.

In addition to figuring all this out yesterday, we also managed to plan out a few other trips this weekend. Finally did planning for the Egypt trip (since we'll be there four days from now) and initial planning for three other trips - another drive across the country, attending a wedding, and going to Cleveland right after classes end to catch an Indians game (and visit the fam, or course).

Perhaps I should do some class work now?

the plan

oh. hi.

is it just me, or did some academic have fun with choosing variable names?

what happens when you lay out on the ice without gloves

seems like perfectly good frisbee weather

more credit cards

For some reason I'm looking at credit cards. Perhaps it's because my Citi Rewards card sucks internationally (fees).

Amex still sucks (unless you charge well over $10,000 a year)
Discover still sucks, except for the occasional 5% categories
Citi still rocks, but not as much as before
Chase has the best offer, but still has the international fee rape like Citi. Damn.

What does Chase have? 3% reward on three categories (the three you spend the most on in a given month) and 1% on everything else.

One weird thing - Citi and Chase don't like online purchases or warehouse clubs. Amex doesn't seem to care - but that 0.5% reward kinda sucks.

I'm going to bed.

chillin' in the er waiting area

So I've been here for the last six hours or so, accompanying a buddy
of mine to the hospital. It's more of a precautionary visit, so
hopefully everything is ok. Basically, I'm getting bored. Brought a
binder full of readings and I just finished what I needed to read for
tomorrow (mostly).

So a rough timeline:
6:22 Arrival
7? Triage
7:55 I leave to go get dinner @ Aladdin's
9:45 Gets checked out
12:35 Done!

I hope I don't get sick from all these people coughing around me.

i'm amused

cons of the west coast

Sometimes I stay up late at night doing weird things like TAXES, and I find that sites start going down for routine maintenance at 1am or so. Knowing that I'll be moving to the west coast shortly, I'm going to start running into this problem three hours earlier. Why don't companies just do the maintenance starting at 3am or so? Sure, that doesn't really give you as much time, but I don't want stuff to be shutting down at 10pm!

Now that I think about it, I do recall that happening to me a few times. Annoying. Tonight's culprit? TurboTax. Somehow the site seems to be worse than what they had last year and two years ago. Lame. If Vanguard, Fidelity, and T. Rowe Price can port their data over, I may just leave!

Speaking of leaving, I'm getting more and more tempted to leave my trusty First Internet Bank of Indiana, who I've been with since 1999. I still love how they reimburse ATM fees (now including international fees!), but this whole credit card fiasco has me irked. The thing doesn't show up when I'm online, so I miss the statement. Yeah... I know. They send me e-mails about statements. But seriously, you expect me to go look at the statement when I can just see everything online? Oh yeah... I also can't pay my credit card since it's not showing up on the Web site. Can't transfer funds online if it doesn't have an account to transfer to! Top candidate to take the job: Everbank.

c.r.e.a.m.

it's a beautiful day

classy class in horchow

lost and found

On! Hello!

damn

I just realized that I've spent about two weeks of my life just
brushing my teeth. With any luck, I'll get to brush my teeth for
another six weeks.

cheap power

For some reason I decided to see how much electricity costs in Seattle. Findings? CHEAP!

New Haven is ridiculously expensive at about 20 cents/kWh. Cleveland was much cheaper at 12 cents/kWh. Seattle? Aside from having a tiered billing system, it's something on the order of 8 cents/kWh. In other words, our electricity bill for the apartment would have been $15 instead of $75.

The downside? It makes saving energy a bit hard to justify. Guessing that I'll be using less than 10kWh a day (since that's how much THREE of us use on a heavy use month), I'll be paying 4 cents/kWh. But even so, a CFL bulb will still pay for itself after 50 hours of use. Here in New Haven we break even in about 10 hours, yet people still use incandescents and leave the lights on like idiots. Thanks, jerks.

priceless?

Price tag for the South America trip: $3571.14

Of that, about $1800 in airfare. Ouch.

oddities

So the restore worked. Mostly.

The good:
Bookmarks are there. Home icons are all there. Photos are there. Notes are there. My Safari cookies were restored too.

The missing:

• My WiFi networks are gone. The passcode lock is gone. Mail password is gone. Looks like anything dealing with passwords is gone. Weird since my cookies in Safari were still there.
  
• Surprising, or not surprising, is that my music wasn't synced. Surprising because that's what I thought made it take so long. Not surprising because I don't sync music to my laptop.
  

The weird:

• It carried over the phone usage. I guess this makes sense if it's the same device, and useful if you're watching your minutes. Struck me as odd though.
• It remembered where I was looking on Google Maps.

Does my inconsistent formatting bother you? It would bother me. I'm leaving it.

dependent

So I managed to lose my phone last night. Apparently I wasn't the only one. After losing it, I realized how dependent I am on the thing. I found myself repeatedly saying "damn" all morning whenever I would have used my phone.

Where's my phone? "damn..."
Wanted to send an e-mail. "damn..."
Can't send a text. "damn..."
Maybe I can call up... "damn..."
Check the weather "damn..."

I guess you can say I get some good value out of the thing. So much so that I've already gotten a replacement... less than 12 hours after it was lost.

Easy, or hard?
As with any lost phone, there's the price of the phone (expensive!), plus the extra gift of having to restore everything. Thankfully, all my contacts are synced with Outlook, so that shouldn't be a problem. The more annoying thing would be restoring all my settings, all my bookmarks, all my programmed WiFi networks, etc. For this, I was pleasantly surprised that iTunes gave me the option to restore my phone to where it was the last time I synced it with my PC (a weird "advantage" for not being able to sync the calendar without a cable). Well, it's taking forever, but at least it should (theoretically) bring the world back into order. I'd be pretty happy if the photos that I've had and my background image were restored since as far as I know I don't have that stuff anywhere else. Why is it taking so damn long? I suppose it's got a good 4-6GB of data to slam back onto the device. We'll see...