The World of Stuff .com

The Beach Boy(s) and other weekend adventures

On Friday, Kevin and Lisa accompanied my sister and me for one of our typical Friday nights out. We started at Tijuana Flats, a quasi-Mexican restaurant. The service is fast, the food is fresh, there are a lot of hot sauces, each person can easily have a separate check, and you don’t have to tip. That makes it a great place for a group of friends with no money to go to.

After that we drove to the beach. We parked next to the border between Broward and Palm Beach Counties. We walked around the area a bit, including on the beach. Looking back toward the shore, on the left you could see some shrimpy apartment-type buildings. That was Deerfield Beach, Broward County. On the right were colossal condo towers as far as the eye could see. Boca Raton, Palm Beach County.

We meandered south toward Deerfield Beach, past the pier. All of a sudden, I heard music. I had forgotten that the Beach Boys were playing that night — by the beach, no less. (Actually, it was just Mike Love and some other guys.) They played all the favorites, and I knew all the words. I don’t care what you think about that. I saw someone who goes to my school there, and she was having a good time. So ha.

Walking back to where we had parked, we saw a huge orange figure out in the ocean. After examining it for a few seconds, it became clear that we were watching something I’d never really seen: moonrise. That moon was rising fast, or so it seemed. It was pretty awesome. And after that, we went to a Starbucks, and then we went home.

Saturday was another day for doing things. Kevin came over to our house, and we rode our bikes around and stuff. At our house we played Monopoly with us, and at his house we ate some guava-flavored ice cream. Then we decided we would get together with Lisa and do some stuff in her neck of the woods.

Before we met at Lisa’s house, Kevin gave me a video he had found at a thrift store: it was the Beatles’ movie Help!, which I’ve hardly seen because I’ve never owned it. Then we picked up Lisa at her house and looked for a place to eat. We saw a few good places, but they were pretty expensive, so we ended up going to McDonald’s. I had a Big Mac, and it was good. Good sauce that Big Mac has. But I don’t like that McDonald’s burgers are really small compared to what you’d get at a sit-down restaurant with weird things on the walls. “Small Mac” isn’t as catchy of a name.

After that, we went over to a Starbucks. Drinks in hand, we walked to a nearby Barnes & Noble to check out some books. We spent about a million years in there and left when it was time to close. But while we were there, I saw some interesting books, including an illustrated version of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Or is it “Strunk’s and White’s”? If I had bought the book, I would know. I can console myself by saying that I probably wouldn’t have had enough money.

When we dropped off Lisa at her house, she gave me a copy of the movie that her friend had me play a part in. The resulting short film, Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Killer That Kills, has a lot of funny bits. Unfortunately, there was no bonus material like bloopers or our in-character trip to Subway (including a mindless car singalong), but it was still enjoyable. I had a lot of fun doing that movie, and I’d work with that bunch again.

Yesterday I didn’t do much except go to the St. Coleman’s Italian Festival with my dad to hear Hello Goodbye, a Beatles tribute band. They were really good, but the drummer (who was also a singer) shined above all. He was amazing. In spite of the fact that the band took their name from a later Beatles song, they really only play the early stuff — the danceable but slightly less critically-acclaimed material. Still, they had every song down well, and they played with a lot of enthusiasm.

Ever heard of SETI@home? It’s a distributed computing project in which users like you download a program that analyzes radio signals for signs of intelligent life in the universe and sends the results back to a central computer. Distributed computing projects such as these lead to much faster calculations than the fastest supercomputers can handle. Long ago, I had SETI@home, and then I got rid of it. The other day I downloaded Folding@home, which actually puts your computer’s time and energy to good use. It basically analyzes proteins to see how they work when they’re folded correctly, and how they cause diseases such as Alzheimer’s, cancer, and Parkinson’s when they don’t. Right now my PC’s analyzing variations of collagen, the most abundant protein in the body. Hopefully, the information that scientists learn from this project will provide cures for diseases.

If some yahoo messes up your monitor by holding a magnet up to it, here’s how to fix it.

One year ago: “Such an endeavor would probably require having a database, but I don’t have any real experience with that.”
Two years ago: “2004 has been declared the year of the search engine wars, in which one search engine will climb up over the rest and declare supremacy.”