life of andyman

What did Sushi A say to Sushi B?

“Wasssaaaa B??!”

Hey everybody!  Let’s get right down to bidness.

FIRST:

My vote for Drew’s blog name is “DrewAreBeautiful.com”

 

SECOND:

My favorite news in the past week was joining the YMCA!  It all started when I found out that in the month of January, in order to help people with their new years resolutions, the Indianapolis YMCAs had a deal where you paid the day of the month as your signing fee.  So, instead of the normal $45 signing fee, I paid $9 because I signed up on January 9th!  –Oh, and monthly fees are effected slightly by income, so as a student, my monthly fee is only $24!  Very cheap!  At the time, I thought, though, that I would be getting my money’s worth, and the Ys would be kinda inner-city-ish.

Now: in Indy, when you sign up for a Y, you’re signing up for the “Greater Indianapolis YMCA Assoc.”  So I actually have access to, like 6 YMCAs, two up north, one right downtown (but it’s small), one east side, &c.  So for the next week I started going to each one, just to see what they were like, right?

So, one day I walked into the 86th street and Westfield Blvd (Nora area) YMCA and holy cow!  It was really nice! Immediately a guy named Jim (who impressively still remembers my name every time I see him there!) swept me up into a tour of the place, and you could tell he was really excited about his place, and that was awesome.

Favorite things about the 86th St. YMCA:

    –Hot tub in the locker room

    –Really nice and clean pool

    –Actually the whole place is really nice and clean and new (they just renovated within the year)

    –They have a “family rec center” where you’re supposed to just let your kids play while you watch TV, but you can actually go to the front desk and check out a Nintendo Wii and play on the big screen TVs in that room.  hehe.

    –The locker room stays stocked with shampoo, soap, and shaving cream and disposable razors!  I haven’t used any of them, but dammit I like bragging about them.

   –Finally:  FITLINK.  All the exercise machines and weightlifting machines have little computers on them.  You type in a unique ID number for yourself and it pulls up all your information!  Tells you how much weight you lifted last time, lets you keep track of the amount of exercise you do (you can look back at the past day/week/month/year, and it knows how much stuff you’ve done!) and it can even suggest machines for you based on goals you want to achieve (like if your goal was “enormously muscular thighs”, as mine is.)

A STORY RELATED TO THE YMCA, WHICH IS TITLED “THE DAY THAT WAS REALLY FOUR DAYS”:

So here’s a funny story: in order to get an ID number to use the fitlink system, you have to sign up for an appointment with one of the staff at the YMCA.  I’m all excited because the place is so nice, so I say, “Ok–when’s the next appointment?  Sign me up!”  They say, “Well, we’re always really busy in January, so the next appointment isn’t until 3 weeks….oh…but someone just cancelled if you want to go tomorrow!”

Oh–but it’s tomorrow 7 A.M.!!!  Not quite believing the words coming out of my lips, I say, “Ok, sign me up for tomorrow.”  (This 7 am appointment is 8 hours from the time I made it, and I have been regularly waking up around 10 am at this point.)

Thus began “The Day that was Really Four Days.”

DAY 1:  I woke up around 6, and headed to the Y.  When I arrived I was a little morning-queasy and bleary-eyed, and I was disgusted to see LOTS of people at the Y, doing their brisk 5-7 am workouts–at least 30 people in the exercise room.  As for me, I thought I would basically tell them how much I weighed, and they’d teach me how to use the computers, and it would take 15 minutes tops.

But, to my surprise, I embarked on a long-term exercise regimen with a personal trainer named Melissa.  We established my goals (posture, flexibility, strength) and developed goals and homework assignments, and then, although it was about the last thing I wanted to do that early in the morning, she took me over to the cardio machines and told me to exercise for 20 minutes.  (Interestingly, I think this was part of the diagnostic–I think she was supposed to determine just how in or out of shape I was based on the 20 minutes she asked me to do.)

DAY 2:  I had brought all of my school stuff to the Y with that morning, because I thought perhaps it would be a good place to study.  I was totally right!  They had free wireless, and every time I got restless and needed a break from reading, I just hopped on a cardio machine.  I think studying at a gym is nearly perfect–the only thing they lack was food.  I studied for about 2-3 hours with some short exercising inbetween.

DAY 3:  I showed up for work at 1 and worked for 4 hours.  Then immediately after work, went to my law class for the night.

DAY 4:  Believe it or not, Dave Searle had called me to see if I wanted to play raquetball that night–at the 86th street Y.  I had already spent about 4.5 hours there in the wee hours of morning.   But…I was still so excited about my new world of Y, that I agreed, and spent another 2 hours at the Y that night.

So, that ONE day, I woke up at 6 am, went to bed at 1 am, and had been at the Y for 6.5 hours, and logged actual exercise time of 243 minutes (I know because the FitLink kept track!).

OK:  MOVING ON, THIRD

Third is short: I am currently eating a most delicious pizza.  What’s that you say?  No, actually it’s not delivery, but I assure you that is a common mistake.  No, sir, it is DiGiornio.

FOURTH

I sent the Portland kids a “Year of the Robot” e-mail about a guest lecture taking place at IUPUI called “The Morality of Machines: Teaching Ethics to Robots.”  And yes, I did attend.  Most of the technical stuff was over my head, but the gist of it is that there’s so many ways to determine what’s ethical, right, so do you make your robot Aristotelian or Marxist or Utilitarian or Libertarian or what?  But that’s if you build the robot with “top-down” ethics–meaning, you insert the ethics of your choice and then it just follows the directions.

Another approach is “bottom-up” ethics, where you develop a robot capable of evaluating the decisions it makes to view their outcomes, and seeing the effect of their decisions on the things around them.  In other words, you develop a robot with “child”-ness.  It performs basic actions and then its masters–the humans around him and such–tell him whether it was right or wrong to do what it did.  So, the robot would have to be able to, say, look into a humans eyes and see that it is causing the human pain or discomfort or even just awkwardness.

Another thing I found interesting is that, sure, we don’t have robots walking around us from day to day, carrying our drinks to us, but there are robots operating large-scale decision-making roles in society right now–but they’re “software bots” meaning they don’t have a body, they’re just on a computer somewhere.  The best example this guy made was the computers at the credit card companies.  For every credit card swipe, they have to look at your credit, determine if you are credit-worthy (which is a value-judgment after all, and isn’t that what ethics are?  Value Judgments?), and then either accept or deny your credit card.

He also spent some time talking about robotic AI research going on all over the world, and describing what they’re currently working on.  All in all, it was interesting and I’m glad I went.  Sorry I can’t recount more, but there was a lot of information!

FINALLY, FIFTH

Last weekend, Adam and I attended a neighborhood Progressive Dinner.  You know–that’s where each part of the meal is held at a different person’s house?  Our meal had five part, each at a different location: drinks/appetizers, soup, salad, entree, dessert.  We had gotten a flyer in our mailbox and we thought, oh, I guess maybe they’ll be 8-10 people that show up.  We volunteered to make a soup.

 And let me tell you breifly, Adam had this soup he wanted to make, and it was the weirdest, craziest receipe I think I’ve ever been a part of.  In fact, I confess I was totally skeptical of this soup–I was worried it would be weird, crazy.  It was called “Thai Pumpkin Mango Soup”.  It contained ingredients which I have never conceived or dared to mix: pumpkin puree, mango chunks and mango puree, peanut butter, both garlic and ginger, plus milk, red peppers, and quite a bit more vinegar than I expected.  Can you even imagine a soup with those ingredients??

When we arrived at the first stop of the progressive dinner we were shocked to see upwards of 50-60 people!

We had no idea when we signed up, but apparently this is an annual event in our neighborhood, and there are people who have been to the last 10 years’ progressive dinners.

Well, I’m proud to say that Adam’s soup–of which I was skeptical–was a complete hit!  I was shocked to find that it was really good!  And it seemed, somehow, agreeable good and not even odd-tasting.  It was just a surprisingly pleasant thing to eat, and several people asked who made it and where can they get the recipe.

Anyway, there were two reasons why this progressive dinner was totally awesome and the best Indianapolis social event I’d been to since I lived here.

1.  It was an ideal environment for meeting lots of people and having lots of conversation.  It’s not like the way most people “socialize” which involves going to a smoky bar where you can’t hear each other speak and spending way too much money on light beer.  No–everyone was sitting around eating, and talking, and every time you went to a new house you had a new opportunity to sit with different people and meet them, too.

2.  The food was really, really, freaking good!  I think it’s the best I’ve eaten in a long time.  It’s because the people that brought food only brought one item, like a soup, or a pasta sauce, or a pan of brownies–and so they pulled out all their best, most delicious recipes and holy cow, every stop had new volumes of delectable faire to excite the taste buds. The salad wasn’t just a bowl of lettuce–it was, like, an italian pasta salad, a greek salad with all the fixins (including lots of feta!), oriental salads, and so on.  Each course was soooo tasty.  I ate like a king.

DENOUEMENT

Ok, so I will try to write shorter, and more often, but those were the things I wanted to talk about.  So thanks for stopping in, and be sure to look for my good friend Drew’s first post at his new website, drewarebeautiful.wordpress.com.  At least, if anyone listened to MY brilliant ideas.