thehowe_v7.1

Well, I've been busy.

For the past two weeks and change, I've been traveling with my parents and brother across the country, hitting all kinds of sights. Check Facebook for the photos.

We arrived in the Seattle area yesterday. Today I: bought a car, opened a bank account, got car insurance, and got renter's insurance. It was a busy day.

If all goes according to plan, I'll have an apartment by the end of the week.

For the past week I've been canoeing with friends & family up in Canada. For the most part, the trip was pretty uneventful. With a few minor exceptions.

Like, for example, how on the drive up, at 3:00 in the morning, we hit a horse. Well, actually two horses. They had somehow gotten loose and decided it would be a good idea to cross the road in front of us. Nobody was hurt, but a car was totaled and two canoes were ruined. Good times.

Then there was the hotel we stayed at that night. We're fairly sure the receptionist was high. First she gave us smoking rooms, which was understandable. Then when we tried switching one of the rooms, she gave us keys to a room that was already occupied. Then when we got another new room, the sheets were dirty. Good times.

Then there was the portage we did on a day trip once we were in Quetico. The water was a little high this year. High, as in over half the portage was up to my knees in water and had a current running through it. Good times.

Like I said, and uneventful trip.

(All kidding aside though, we had a great time, modulo a little bad luck here and there).

Fifteen minute impressions of MIT vs. Harvard, based on walking around their campuses during the summer (so, probably totally inaccurate):

MIT: Based on the number of pasty people wearing glasses and inappropriate tropical shirts, approximately 67% more nerds than Harvard. The nerds were very polite, though.

Harvard: Based on the number of people playing instruments on street corners, approximately 1000% more hippies than MIT. The hippies were very polite, though.

Things I learned on the 14 hour drive from Ann Arbor to Boston:

1. Trucks don't have to go slower in other states.
2. Getting passed by a semi going 10 over the speed limit is scary.
3. There is a restaurant called "Quaker Steak and Lube".
4. I find the idea of a restaurant named "Quaker Steak and Lube" vaguely disturbing.
5. Whoever designed Boston's streets was clearly on crack.

Later this weekend: hang gliding. It will either be awesome, or I will die. Possibly both.

I quietly added a link to the side navigation menu under the "friends" section a couple of weeks ago, but I thought I should probably mention something here, as the event it refers to is rather momentous. My old old friend, Nikki Wendling, whose family has known my family since before we were born, got engaged. Obviously, congratulations are in order.

As the story goes in my family, my parents didn't decide they wanted to have a kid until they babysat Nikki - so, as I've been told many times, I owe my existence to her. Our families didn't see much of her when we were children - her family moved to Ohio, so typically only once a year or so. Then in the summer of '98 our families started an annual tradition: Canoe trips into Quetico Park in Canada, just north of Minnesota. She, her sister Jess, myself and Troy have become much closer in the years since.

As always, news of people in my age group entering the "real world" is a little scary. Nikki's only a little older than I am (1, 2 years? That's horrible that I don't remember.), and the fact that she's engaged is just downright scary. Yeah, sure, people I graduated with are already getting married, but plenty of people I graduated with already had kids when we graduated, so that doesn't mean much. This is Nikki, whom I've known forever, and she's getting married.

Yikes.

Well, it has certainly been awhile since I last had a chance to update. This is going to be a big one, so buckle in.

My flight for Seattle left Saturday morning. Of course, the flight from Lansing to Detroit was delayed due to fog (Murphy's Law). Luckily, it wasn't a huge problem; we just drove to Detroit and caught the flight from Detroit to Seattle directly. Oddly enough, the person I sat next to on the plane was the website manager for Blue Cross / Blue Shield, going to Seattle for a conference. So, we had a good chat on the flight - I actually knew a lot more about web development than she did.

After that it was pretty easy. Got my luggage, caught a taxi into town, got all checked into my apartment without any problems. I'll post photos this weekend. Actually, I lied - there was one problem: no internet. I actually just got hooked up today. I'll talk on that whole fiasco later.

Work has been pretty good so far. I'm working with a good team, lots of smart, fun guys. I've been doing lots of preliminary stuff this week. Reading up on Amazon's proprietary systems, watching tutorials, stuff like that. I have a meeting on Monday with my manager to actually iron out what I'll be doing for the next 11 weeks. FYI, I'm not going to be posting any details about what I do at work, for obvious reasons.

Anyways, I have a week worth of emails and whatnot to catch up on, but I'll post more later.

In last month's issue of the Michigan Review, a lecture on "European Anti-American Sentiment" was covered. I did not attend this lecture, but I am going to assume that the Review presented the contents of the lecture in a mostly unbiased way. The lecturer, one Professor Andrei S. Markovits, claimed that there is an unprecedented level of anti-Americanism being displayed by both the aristocracy and the "lower classes" of Europe. Now, I know that I'm not always the most socially observant person in the world, but over the summer I spent over a month traveling all over Europe. I visited Finland, Sweden, Denmark, France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands, and never in all of our travels did any of the members of my family get the feeling that there was a prevailing level of anti-Americanism. In fact, one Frenchman specifically told us that the vast majority of the people in France don't have a problem with Americans, just with American foreign policy. Professor Markovits, on the other hand, claims that this anti-Americanism extends to nearly every aspect of American culture.

Okay, so granted Markovits probably did lots of research and all that crap on this topic. I still think that he's wrong, and that this isn't the message we need to be sending the American public. The last thing we need is an "us vs. them" sentiment to emerge in the American public, and it's unprofessional schmucks like Markovits that are breeding it.

Something interesting happened to me today. Actually, somethings interesting happened, but I'll take them one at a time. So the other day, I was checking my hotmail account when I noticed some mail that looked like it had been returned because the addresses were incorrect. This intrigued me, because I haven't sent any mail from that account for a few months now. I looked, and the message was a porn advertisement, so I figured the spammers had just disguised the message as a returned message to get me to read it. No big deal, they're always trying new stuff. But I'd been meaning to change my password anyways, so I figured this was as good a time as any to do it. Well, today when I tried to sign in to my email, I got a rather peculiar message. I was informed that I had tried to sign in to my account too many times unsuccessfully, and so my account was locked for a few minutes. This was also interesting, because I only typed in my old password by mistake once, and that's never been enough to trigger that message before. I wonder now if perhaps something more sinister than I realized was going on. Maybe my password was grabbed at one of the internet cafes I used in Europe? I'm not sure, but it's rather disturbing. Luckily, nothing important ever comes to that email address, so no real harm came from it.

In other, totally unrelated news, I went with my family to pick blueberries today. We got to the place we've been going to every summer for as long as I can remember, but this year we left after picking for only a few minutes. This year their crop has been infested by bugs, and almost every blueberry had little white worms in it. It was really gross. We ended up just going out and buying blueberries from the market instead.

Location: Somewhere between Newark, NJ and Detroit

Ugh... what a day. Our flight home from Amsterdam left at about 2 PM today, or it was supposed to. As we were about to taxi to the runway they stopped the plane because a refugee was hiding in the wheel wells. After the police had searched the plane inside and out for an hour and escorted a family of four off of the plane, we finally were allowed to leave. Fortunately, the rest of the flight went smoothly and we only arrived in JFK 20 minutes late. It was then 4:30 PM, and our flight from Newark to Detroit didn't leave until 8 PM - plenty of time. The ground transportation official kindly informed us that we could get a taxi or take a bus to Newark, but that the shuttle bus would be cheaper. Optimistically, we boarded the bus.

Three hours and 20 minutes later, at about 7:50 PM, we finally arrived at Newark after cruising JFK for more passengers, getting stuck in traffic, and having to wait 10 minutes when we switched buses. The total fare was as much as a cab would have been, and the cab could have got us there in an hour and a half, max. The lady at the ticket desk - once we found it - told us our plane was leaving in 5 minutes so we'd better run. Luckily all of our luggage was small enough to be carry-ons. Unluckily, my dad had to leave behind his good Swiss Army Knife and eyeglass pliers, because he couldn't take them on the plane. Despite having our bags searched at the security checkpoint by a guard that was in no hurry and being told that they would not hold the plane for us, we finally made it to the airplane and are now on the way to Detroit.

Now all we have to do is complete the 2 hour drive home, keeping in mind that according to our biological clocks it's 3 AM instead of 9 PM. Yay.

Location: Fussen, Germany, in the foothills of the Alps on the German-Austrian border

Ugh - it's been a tiring couple of days. Two days ago was our last day in Venice, and it was kind of our "lazy" day since we didn't have any major sights to see, so my parents thought we'd just stroll around the city for awhile. We ended up walking the entire length of the Grand Canal plus some, which encompasses essentially the entire city of Venice. This, mind you, was our lazy day. Today we hiked somewhere between 15 - 20 miles in the Alps. We left at about 10:30 AM and got back at around 6:30. We rested a total of 45 minutes during that time.

... I don't know why I vacation with these people. Screw it, my feet hurt and I'm tired, so I'm going to bed.

P.S. - I got so bored the other day I started doing the crossword in USA Today. Anybody know a 4 letter word for "Apropos of"?