Monday -- campusing, and baseball!
Whee, today was fun too.
I went to Wean at noon and met up with Kevin and Alex, and we went to Tessaro's for lunch. On the way there a quite bizarre thing happened -- there were trucks working on something by that closed parking lot near the Forbes Field wall and the Carnegie Library. Well... they seemed to be leaving, so Kevin drove around them to get to Forbes Ave. Some truck behind him started honking and flashing lights... when we got to the red light on Forbes, the guy behind him started yelling something about "a $5000 fine for passing by a paint work crew, I've called your license number in to the cops," and Kevin's like "but sir, uh, I'm sorry, can I go explain it to them?" and the guy went off in a huff. So, the thing is, we doubled around to try to find the paint crew and plead the case of "What the", except that they were GONE. Literally and entirely, it was only 3-4 minutes later, and all the cones and trucks were gone. Very bizarre.
So, we went to lunch. It was really good. I got a gourmet cheeseburger and had to eat it with a knife and fork. Ahhh, Tessaro's. :) We hung out for a while chatting after that until some combination of the parking meter running out and Kevin wanting to get work done drove us back to Wean.
Alex and I stood around chatting in Wean for a while more; I met some first-year PhD student named William who was really nice and funny and the three of us had a bizarre conversation in which we decided that if programming languages were food preferences, ML would be vegetarianism, and Haskell would be veganism, and thus C++ was for omnivores... and Perl would be those weird "I eat anything except red meat" vegetarians. Or something. It was fun.
After that I went and signed up for a 15-minute advising slot with mjs for Wednesday, before my flight. Hee. (He told me to.)
I came to the cslounge and hung out there for an hour... mostly talking to Christine and Michael for a while, and Kevin (Shiue) came by later on, and there were other random undergrads around that I talked to a bit. Kathryn, my old stand partner from Kiltie Band, came by, because it turns out she's Christine's OS partner. She'll be at Amazon this summer, which is neat, maybe we'll get to hang out sometime.
I went to the KGB meeting for a little while... I walked in with a copy of the Tartan, sat in the back, and read it...![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jcreed joined me after a while, which was nice. This was the annual officer election meeting, which is never all that entertaining, so I left around 5:15. They hadn't even finished the president election by that point. BTW, to damion: if "mediocrity is a sin", why isn't there a movie called "Mediocrity City"?
just kidding.
I took the bus downtown after that and went to a Pirates game. I got to the stadium like 6:05, because I misestimated.mj2q showed up a bit after that, and then dvarin, and right around 6:28 genericman and jweisz showed up. We got tickets in the $27 seats, which would cost $50 in Seattle and there's no scuppering way you'd EVER get 5 seats next to each other, 23 rows behind home plate, 30 minutes before game time. The attendance as I wrote it down was 11,220. Heh.
We grabbed food (woo! Primanti's!) and then sat down to watch the game. I took a bazillion pictures of the stadium for Megan.
I won't write too much about the game here... but, it was a fairly low scoring game for a while. Mark Mulder, our old nemesis at the A's, was pitching for St. Louis, and he had a perfect game going into the 4th, but then walked someone and it all went away, the Pirates scoring their only run in the 5th on a weird error where David Ross hit what was supposed to be a sacrifice fly to left field, except when the throw to the plate beat Ward there, he ran into the catcher and knocked the ball out of his mitt, so they called it an E-2, not an RBI sac fly. Doh. They had a chance to score again an inning later, kinda -- with two outs and one man on first, Craig Wilson hit a long fly ball to left field, and the fielder didn't quite get to it -- so it should have been an easy double, but for some reason, the third base coach waved Lawton home... he was out by a mile. It was a really risky move with two outs, I think.
The Cardinals came into the top of the 9th inning leading the Pirates 2-1. They left the 9th inning leading the Pirates 11-1. Carl had asked me earlier in the evening what one does with a scorecard if the players all go to bat in an inning, and I was like "It's not going to happen, but you just kinda shift everything over a column." Well, oops. 12 Cardinals batted in the top of the 9th, and here's what they did -- ground out, single, double (RBI), single (RBI), single, walk (with someone scoring on a wild pitch), walk, pitching change, walk (RBI), strikeout, single (2 RBI), single, double (3 RBI), line to second. It was really pathetic. I would feel bad for Brian Meadows, but he really pitched like shit. The guys were knocking the baseball all over the place because he was just feeding it to them.
The Pirates have cute gimmicks for their scoreboards when they show the players. The first time through, they show these paintings the players have done of their names. The second time through, they have rebus puzzles for each player (like, Jack Wilson is a set of jacks - S + a will + the sun. Or Ty Wigginton is a tie + a wig + IN + a 2000 lb weight. Good thing they didn't try to do Mackowiak). The third time through they show a treasure map with the player's head in phantom, and the fourth time they seem to show the photoshopped players' heads with an eyepatch and falchions crossed behind them. It's cute.
It was neat to see the Cardinals. I forgot they had David Eckstein as their shortstop and leading batter. They also have So Taguchi, who is reeeeeeally fast for a 35-year-old right fielder; he must be trying to live up to the Ichiro reputation. It was rad to see Pujols-Rolen-Edmonds, the heart of the killer Cardinals from last year. (Just for Josh and Ficus, I even did the "huh huh, Pujols" thing.) And whoa, Mark Mulder. It's just a shame I didn't get to see them send up John Mabry to bat!
So, yeah. Game. Afterwards we stopped in the team store for a bit, and then Jason gave me and Carl and Justin rides home. Carl and I have been staying up chatting about stuff -- I've been teaching him about baseball and he's been teaching me about thread-safety. I guess it's an even trade.
Waaaah, my last day in town. Still not sure of exact plans (except that I get to hang out with Django at lunchtime). Oh, uh, I should also probly start begging for a ride home from the airport in Seattle come Wednesday night...
I went to Wean at noon and met up with Kevin and Alex, and we went to Tessaro's for lunch. On the way there a quite bizarre thing happened -- there were trucks working on something by that closed parking lot near the Forbes Field wall and the Carnegie Library. Well... they seemed to be leaving, so Kevin drove around them to get to Forbes Ave. Some truck behind him started honking and flashing lights... when we got to the red light on Forbes, the guy behind him started yelling something about "a $5000 fine for passing by a paint work crew, I've called your license number in to the cops," and Kevin's like "but sir, uh, I'm sorry, can I go explain it to them?" and the guy went off in a huff. So, the thing is, we doubled around to try to find the paint crew and plead the case of "What the", except that they were GONE. Literally and entirely, it was only 3-4 minutes later, and all the cones and trucks were gone. Very bizarre.
So, we went to lunch. It was really good. I got a gourmet cheeseburger and had to eat it with a knife and fork. Ahhh, Tessaro's. :) We hung out for a while chatting after that until some combination of the parking meter running out and Kevin wanting to get work done drove us back to Wean.
Alex and I stood around chatting in Wean for a while more; I met some first-year PhD student named William who was really nice and funny and the three of us had a bizarre conversation in which we decided that if programming languages were food preferences, ML would be vegetarianism, and Haskell would be veganism, and thus C++ was for omnivores... and Perl would be those weird "I eat anything except red meat" vegetarians. Or something. It was fun.
After that I went and signed up for a 15-minute advising slot with mjs for Wednesday, before my flight. Hee. (He told me to.)
I came to the cslounge and hung out there for an hour... mostly talking to Christine and Michael for a while, and Kevin (Shiue) came by later on, and there were other random undergrads around that I talked to a bit. Kathryn, my old stand partner from Kiltie Band, came by, because it turns out she's Christine's OS partner. She'll be at Amazon this summer, which is neat, maybe we'll get to hang out sometime.
I went to the KGB meeting for a little while... I walked in with a copy of the Tartan, sat in the back, and read it...
jcreed joined me after a while, which was nice. This was the annual officer election meeting, which is never all that entertaining, so I left around 5:15. They hadn't even finished the president election by that point. BTW, to damion: if "mediocrity is a sin", why isn't there a movie called "Mediocrity City"?just kidding.
I took the bus downtown after that and went to a Pirates game. I got to the stadium like 6:05, because I misestimated.
mj2q showed up a bit after that, and then dvarin, and right around 6:28 genericman and jweisz showed up. We got tickets in the $27 seats, which would cost $50 in Seattle and there's no scuppering way you'd EVER get 5 seats next to each other, 23 rows behind home plate, 30 minutes before game time. The attendance as I wrote it down was 11,220. Heh.We grabbed food (woo! Primanti's!) and then sat down to watch the game. I took a bazillion pictures of the stadium for Megan.
I won't write too much about the game here... but, it was a fairly low scoring game for a while. Mark Mulder, our old nemesis at the A's, was pitching for St. Louis, and he had a perfect game going into the 4th, but then walked someone and it all went away, the Pirates scoring their only run in the 5th on a weird error where David Ross hit what was supposed to be a sacrifice fly to left field, except when the throw to the plate beat Ward there, he ran into the catcher and knocked the ball out of his mitt, so they called it an E-2, not an RBI sac fly. Doh. They had a chance to score again an inning later, kinda -- with two outs and one man on first, Craig Wilson hit a long fly ball to left field, and the fielder didn't quite get to it -- so it should have been an easy double, but for some reason, the third base coach waved Lawton home... he was out by a mile. It was a really risky move with two outs, I think.
The Cardinals came into the top of the 9th inning leading the Pirates 2-1. They left the 9th inning leading the Pirates 11-1. Carl had asked me earlier in the evening what one does with a scorecard if the players all go to bat in an inning, and I was like "It's not going to happen, but you just kinda shift everything over a column." Well, oops. 12 Cardinals batted in the top of the 9th, and here's what they did -- ground out, single, double (RBI), single (RBI), single, walk (with someone scoring on a wild pitch), walk, pitching change, walk (RBI), strikeout, single (2 RBI), single, double (3 RBI), line to second. It was really pathetic. I would feel bad for Brian Meadows, but he really pitched like shit. The guys were knocking the baseball all over the place because he was just feeding it to them.
The Pirates have cute gimmicks for their scoreboards when they show the players. The first time through, they show these paintings the players have done of their names. The second time through, they have rebus puzzles for each player (like, Jack Wilson is a set of jacks - S + a will + the sun. Or Ty Wigginton is a tie + a wig + IN + a 2000 lb weight. Good thing they didn't try to do Mackowiak). The third time through they show a treasure map with the player's head in phantom, and the fourth time they seem to show the photoshopped players' heads with an eyepatch and falchions crossed behind them. It's cute.
It was neat to see the Cardinals. I forgot they had David Eckstein as their shortstop and leading batter. They also have So Taguchi, who is reeeeeeally fast for a 35-year-old right fielder; he must be trying to live up to the Ichiro reputation. It was rad to see Pujols-Rolen-Edmonds, the heart of the killer Cardinals from last year. (Just for Josh and Ficus, I even did the "huh huh, Pujols" thing.) And whoa, Mark Mulder. It's just a shame I didn't get to see them send up John Mabry to bat!
So, yeah. Game. Afterwards we stopped in the team store for a bit, and then Jason gave me and Carl and Justin rides home. Carl and I have been staying up chatting about stuff -- I've been teaching him about baseball and he's been teaching me about thread-safety. I guess it's an even trade.
Waaaah, my last day in town. Still not sure of exact plans (except that I get to hang out with Django at lunchtime). Oh, uh, I should also probly start begging for a ride home from the airport in Seattle come Wednesday night...
no subject
The next time I'm there, I'll write down what they do for Mack.
BTW -- you doing anything tonight? IMSO's on Pitt campus if you want to drop by and say hello. I don't think we're playing DDR, but I'm not sure what we're playing.