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Doodles

Colin — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 03:35:57 +0000

When I was in high school and undergrad, I used to doodle a lot on my notebook paper and class handouts. I’ve been going through old boxes and folders of stuff from high school and college in order to get rid of things I’m never going to look at again. In the process, I discovered a bunch of doodles I had made – probably between 1996 and 1998. I think I’ve only scratched the surface, but here are a few that I found interesting, presented without comment.

Beard Experiment 2009

Colin — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 01:00:39 +0000

This year I’ve been hearing a lot about people growing “winter beards”. This got me thinking about growing a beard myself. I’ve thought about it in the past, but I never followed through on it because I was pretty sure that it wouldn’t look good. The times that I had gone a week or more between shaves had taught me that my facial hair is patchy. I could get away with a goatee but I couldn’t count on my whiskers to cover my cheeks.

However, I couldn’t help wondering if I would be able to grow a good looking beard if I only gave the empty patches some time to fill in. I had never had the fortitude in the past to keep on growing it out after a week or a week and half. So, this year during my January term, I decided to try and see what it would look like.

I shaved on January 2nd in preparation for a wedding I was in on the 3rd. Since then, I’ve only shaved my neck and some little patches at the tops of my cheeks. Here’s the result after a little over a month of growth:

I think it looks pretty good from the front. However, the sides leave a bit to be desired. As you can see below, the patches didn’t really fill in all that well, even after a month. In addition, the beard doesn’t connect to my hair at all. There is no way I could pull off any kind of sideburns.

The right side is pretty patchy but it does the best job of actually connecting to my hair. The left side is fuller near my mouth but it’s almost as if the beard ends halfway across my cheek and it doesn’t even come close to connecting to my hair.

So, where does this leave me? I feel like the beard is not full enough to look respectable in a professional context, so I think it probably needs to go. What do you think?

In any case, I’ve enjoyed letting it grow out and seeing the results but I’m frustrated by my facial hair. I think there are two ideal cases when it comes to facial hair:

you basically have no facial hair and you seldom have to shave.
you have lots of facial hair and it is well-distributed, allowing you lots of options when it comes to styling your facial hair.

Unfortunately, I appear to be in an annoying middle ground between these two ideals; I have enough facial hair that I have to shave regularly but I don’t have enough and it is not well enough distributed for me to grow a good beard.

It feels like Friday

Colin — Wed, 07 May 2008 19:32:16 +0000

Maybe some of you can relate to this: whenever I have something big to do – like a big deadline to meet or something like that – I always feel like it’s Friday when it’s over.

Today, I gave my first lecture to a class. I’ve been a TA for a couple of classes before and I’ve held recitations in front of reasonably large groups of students before but I’ve never given the lecture for the professor. Yesterday, the professor teaching the course I’m TAing this semester asked me to give today’s lecture because he’s out of town with his daughter who is (possibly still in the process of) having a baby. I had about 15 hours from his request to the start of lecture, during which time I had to prepare for lecture and squeeze in some sleep. Anyway, I spent a lot of hours preparing and overall it went pretty well. However, when I was done, it felt like Friday. Too bad it’s only Wednesday.

Taxes sent; scammed by Taxachusetts again

Colin — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 17:07:15 +0000

I was under the impression that state taxes were supposed to cost you less than federal. Evidently, I was mistaken. We got every penny of our federal tax withholdings refunded. However, we owed Massachusetts more than $400. What is that about?

Dear “the man”,

Please enjoy more than 400 of our hard-earned dollars. Perhaps you might consider using them to repair the roads here in MA, which, frankly, are a joke. Even the recently repaired roads here are a joke. Or perhaps you should use the money to overhaul the tax code so you stop scamming people who have no money.

Sincerely,
Colin

First Mii Contest

Colin — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 02:24:51 +0000

After having the Wii in my possession for almost 3 weeks, I finally got to play it when my family and I celebrated Christmas on Dec. 22nd. One of the first activities was creating Miis for myself, Heather and other family members. I spent relatively little time on mine, but got a satisfactory result after probably only 10 minutes or so.

With mine complete, we moved on to Heather’s. This proved to be much more difficult. In fact, we have gone through probably 4 iterations and we’re still not all that happy with the result. So, since we are having little success ourselves, we thought it would be a good idea to have the first subject in the Mii contest be Heather, whose chose her name on the Wii to mimic the name she uses when she posts comments on my blog, namely “Your Wife.”

I had mentioned before that there is a flash interface online for making Miis. However, once I started using the editor on the Wii, I discovered that the flash interface provides much more customizability than the editor on the Wii. So, in order to ensure that the Mii contest produces winners that can actually be used on the Wii, I will restrict entries to the contest to those created using the actual Mii editor on the Wii. Perhaps this will provide impetus for those of you who want a Wii but haven’t yet purchased one to get out there and buy one. Incidentally, this site reports that Best Buy will have a ton (eg. ~150 each) of Wiis on January 15th. So, if you’re still having a hard time finding one, this may be your chance.

For those of you interested in participating in the contest, pictures of my wife can be found below.