Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in JJ's LiveJournal:

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Thursday, January 1st, 2009
12:17 am	rabbit rabbit. (best thing about being in this timezone) (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 23rd, 2008
1:50 pm	coolness with 2 home-made screens, we now have achieved cross-ventilation without flies everywhere. it is a wonderful thing. Current Mood: cooling down (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
12:47 am	pictures are cool if you're bored, i uploaded a ton of pictures to my gallery. spent a weekend in the swiss alps (pictures above), and in wine country in switzerland west of geneva (more pictures), and adam and cara visited (even more pictures), and i spent a lot of time walking around geneva (just guess). normally, this would be a pain and take a while with picasa, which is why i haven't done it. but then i wrote a program to put a button into picasa to make it easy. if you use picasa and gallery, picasa2gallery is available here, for now. hopefully i'll move it to sourceforge soon. adam and elyssa are coming to visit tomorrow, so that's as close as i'll get to an update for at least a few days. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
10:52 pm	6 months = 25% I've been meaning to write about all the good and bad that France (and Switzerland) has to offer. I figure now's as good a time as any.</p> The Good: All the toilets have 2 flush buttons/triggers on them. One for big flushes. One for little ones. Why don't we have those? In Switzerland at least, they even have toilet handles on the floor to just step on. Same for sink controls. People are generally nice. Wine is good and stupidly cheap. There are 4 places I can think of to buy fresh bread every day within a mile. Even more places to buy fresh cuts of meat. Indian food is the same here. Chicken Vindaloo is Vindaloo Poulet, and it really is. Mountains are pretty. Cop cars make Honda Civics look huge. Crossing the border into a different country takes exactly as long as it takes you to walk (and even sometimes run) across the border. No stops. I'm super productive at work, since I don't have much else to do. Dogs are allowed everywhere. And there's lots of them. Bags of coffee that you can buy from the grocery store are great. There are lots of girls that play volleyball. (Usually there's a shortage in the US, for the uninformed.) Internet access is fast. Prescription drugs cost 15 Euro apiece without insurance. With insurance, it's even less. Kebabs are yummy. Yay bittorrent. There is guinness. Lots of time to read and listen to audio books. No commute. In the non-winter months, there's a market down the street every saturday with lots of fresh food and other things like unpasteurized milk. The Bad: It's quiet and lonely most of the time. It's far away from the east coast. Beer selection is worse that CT. EVERYTHING is closed Sunday. Most things are closed Monday too. Steaks are small and expensive. People seem to have a weird feeling self entitlement. People are generally ... slow. Not stupid. They just take their sweet time about everything The bank still won't give us an ATM card. The government still won't give me a Carte des Sejour (aka Work Visa) No car makes it hard (but not impossible) to get places on a whim. No skiing this year due to broken shoulder. People don't really understand 'computers'. No tv. Missing attending weddings. Not just that there's no one to talk to. Really, most of the time, there's nothing to say. I work. I enjoy a glass or 3 of wine. I go to bed. No snow. The only thing I will learn here (besides what I teach myself working) is French. I'm sure there'll be more sometime. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, March 21st, 2008
11:41 am	my anti-boycott message I read the interview. I don't think LJ users should boycott. So I decided I should post something. We had some of Donna's German friends staying with us earlier in the week. I was working late, and one of them stuck his head in to say good night. You'd almost expect him to say "Good luck with work" or something. Instead he said "I wish you effective working". I like the difference. (Comment on this)
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
8:35 pm	travels tomorrow at 9:20 am, my time, i hop on a plane. i should land around 12:45 your time at Newark. I'll be in CT for next week, and just generally around Troy and Boston the week after, without much for specific plans. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, February 10th, 2008
6:29 pm	moving fast there's something exhilerating about driving 106 mph, and having the realization, "i don't have to look for speed traps. all i need to do is keep the car going smoothly on the road" ... and then have someone come up behind you to pass. i like deutschland. also, something else fun. me being served a plate of meat so big that i have a hard time finishing it, for only 10€. Current Mood: happy (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 1st, 2008
12:11 am	happy new year i win. rabbit rabbit too. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, December 31st, 2007
11:46 pm	meme-age that's a long freaking test, doug. I Am A: Lawful Good Human Sorcerer (5th Level) Ability Scores: Strength-15 Dexterity-17 Constitution-17 Intelligence-16 Wisdom-19 Charisma-16 Alignment: Lawful Good A lawful good character acts as a good person is expected or required to act. He combines a commitment to oppose evil with the discipline to fight relentlessly. He tells the truth, keeps his word, helps those in need, and speaks out against injustice. A lawful good character hates to see the guilty go unpunished. Lawful good is the best alignment you can be because it combines honor and compassion. However, lawful good can be a dangerous alignment because it restricts freedom and criminalizes self-interest. Race: Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like. Class: Sorcerers are arcane spellcasters who manipulate magic energy with imagination and talent rather than studious discipline. They have no books, no mentors, no theories just raw power that they direct at will. Sorcerers know fewer spells than wizards do and acquire them more slowly, but they can cast individual spells more often and have no need to prepare their incantations ahead of time. Also unlike wizards, sorcerers cannot specialize in a school of magic. Since sorcerers gain their powers without undergoing the years of rigorous study that wizards go through, they have more time to learn fighting skills and are proficient with simple weapons. Charisma is very important for sorcerers; the higher their value in this ability, the higher the spell level they can cast. Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail) (Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007
7:56 pm	screwed up Final picture I'm home. Really really tired. And can only type 1 handed. Hopefully get better soon. i <3 morphine. Mental Note: When French doctor says "1 plate and screw", he doesn't know exactly what he's saying. (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 1st, 2007
9:49 pm	what is up been meaning to write about france for a while. then thursday morning happened. apparently i fell in the shower. i say apparently, because i have no memory of this. when i woke up in bed, i had a killer pain in my shoulder. i decided to try to sleep it off. several hours after that, i gave up. i went and knocked my my landlord's door and asked for a ride to the hospital. there, i got morphine, which is good for the pain, bad for the stomach. my shoulder's still fucked up, but they put it back in place. monday morning i'm seeing a shoulder specialist a few towns over to see if i need surgery. kinda looks like i shattered part of the humerus (the bone your bicept and tricept are on). imaging in france is cool. most of the pictures are part of a cat scan i think, and if you play them in a fast slideshow, they're cool. This one's my favorite. I should stop typing now, since it hurts, and go to bed. Wish me luck monday with the specialist. Current Mood: owww (19 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, October 12th, 2007
10:15 pm	good day jj += zoe (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, September 23rd, 2007
6:46 pm	2% I'm sore. I found a place relativly nearby our place to play disc golf yesterday. On top of that, they have beach volleyball courts set up too, with good nets, so I stayed there all afternoon yesterday. Now I really don't want to walk, but that's ok. On the way home, I take a bus and a train into Geneva. The bus stopped before it was supposed to, and the driver started talking. I couldn't tell what he was saying, so I just got off and started walking. Apparently, there was a drunk guy on top of a street light right next to the bus and train route, so everything stopped in both directions. Including lots of people taking pictures and cheering the guy on. Luckly, they were still running trains from the other side of the guy back to france, otherwise it would have been another 3-4 km walk home. What else have I discovered? I found a gaming store that sells settlers in French. Now I just need someone to play with. Adam and I proved that 2 person settlers sucks. Oooo ... maybe I could work on my online version. I've been doing enough work that I haven't had much desire to code for fun outside of work. We've been watching a lot of House downloaded from itunes. I downloaded Season 1 of Babylon 5 as well to watch when Doinn’s doing work. Hopefully the ikea order will arrive Tuesday, so we will have a bed with a boxspring, and drawers to put our clothes in. We have a phone number, if anyone wants it. We can’t call out until we get banking stuff taken care of, but it’s better than nothing. Oh, and the bread here still rocks. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, September 20th, 2007
11:12 am	working from home Isn't as bad as I thought it would be. I talk to people in Norwalk at least once or twice a day, which is good. And I don't get interrupted too much. Mostly because I get 6 hours of work in before they wake up. Though I've been taking my time about it, since I've been staying up later here (normal work hours there) to help people. So I put in my 8+ hours, but I get little breaks. Yesterday I rode my bike 15km (round trip) to go to a place so I could order a desk. From a place where they didn't speak any english at all. Got a chair too. :) But it won't be here until next Saturday. :( But I did get a good view of Mt. Blanc, as well as the backside of the mountain that right in front of our apartment. I need to check out the times for open volleyball in Geneva. I think it's tonight. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 17th, 2007
10:52 pm	1% down ... give or take It's weird being here in a thunderstorm and realized that no one that reads this is seeing the same thunderstorm I am. Things are good in france. We arrived to a wonderful spice package from beckett and christie that made making dinner that night fun. and it's made any time that donna made something bland taste yummy too. When we arrived, our landlord offered to drive us to the store to get stuff, which was incredibly nice. They're both cool. After getting stuff from the supermarket, I realized I didn't get a bottle of wine. It would seem weird to me to be in france and not have a bottle of wine. So I walked out to the corner store to get one. Found it. Walked about half way home and realized "I don't think we hav ea wine opener." Shit. Walked back. The store didn't sell them, but the guy behind the counter offered me his. He said I could bring it back tomorrow night. Very cool. What else ... Oh yeah. To get a bank account in france, you need proof that you live in france, like an electric bill. To get an electric bill in france, you need a bank account to charge it to. It's like they've never thought of this before. Addendum: After getting everything else they needed, they wanted proof that I lived in CT where I said I did. LuckilyI happened to pack a gas bill I needed to pay. What else? Not much. Our landlords were throwing away stuff, so we got free pots (after we already bought some) and a free bedframe (which now we won't buy). Stuff is arriving next week, which should mean I can actually take pictures of our apartment. Untill then, you just have these, until I get motivated and upload wedding pictures. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 10th, 2007
3:58 pm	france is fun. though i wish everyone didn't talk in weird accents. we have an espresso machine we don't have internet (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 5th, 2007
5:41 am	'cause in ireland, there's nothing better to do than memes well, that's not true. there's lots of fun in ireland. but not while i'm waiting for donna to get ready to go. ( Song of Ice and Fire Meme (stolen from Kris) ) (Comment on this)
Saturday, September 1st, 2007
2:32 pm	au revior leaving for france on monday. won't have much internet access until sometime long after that it seems. going to dublin first to see what a real guinness tastes like. everything's good. i have lots of wedding pictures that i'll share later. now, if i can only find a better way to dispose of old bookshelves besides hatchet. Current Mood: tired, but excited (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 29th, 2007
6:16 pm	long day, but jj += french work visa (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 19th, 2007
3:02 pm	I know those people Copied from Kate D, who Copied it from Tracey. Cash Cab is a game show where people get driven around NYC in a cab for money. The people that set the new record include Saavik, from Psi U. (4 Comments |Comment on this)