oh so cold

Yeah, I can see why all those SoCal people are bundling up:

Yes, those of you in SoCal better make sure you have extra layers on underneath. In other weather news, it actually did have the nerve to snow here. Not much, mind you. But a slight dusting, already blown away... By comparison:

Tonight: a grand reunion of high school friends indulging in our favorite high school pastime, particularly in class: euchre. Those of you not from the Midwest probably are unaware of the implicit awesomeness that is euchre, a game that is as much at home around a card table as it is on a bus, or even standing in line at Cedar Point. Yes, this deceptively simple game still has plenty of room for strategy and reverse psychology while still having the beauty of rapid-fire gameplay.

back away from the almanac

I know FBI alerts are meant to be taken seriously, especially in these Orange times. So everyone be on the lookout for people armed with almanacs. Who knows what kind of terror could be unleashed by someone who knows Texas was admitted to the Union in 1845 or that raw onions can cure insomnia...

Saturday night I met up with some high school friends and ended up at a classy Chinese restaurant in Farmington Hills (one of their roommates was working at the bar). From the moment I pulled up and saw the words Szechuan Cuisine in cursive script I knew something was wrong. When I got there at 10:30 there was no one in the restaurant; the party was clearly at the bar. And by "party" I mean a crowd of 30-something metrosexuals standing around chattering as some balding guy was belting out terrible covers of 80s hits. Behind the bar were thousand-dollar bottles of booze. Later a DJ started spinning dance beats, which the crowd tried very hard to ignore as they sipped their martinis. Clearly we had found the middle-aged yuppie hangout.

oh so nice

[12:07 AM] TheOneZozo: yeah, it was great, i was just outside at 11 in just a sweatshirt
[12:08 AM] Christine C: waaaaaaat???
[12:10 AM] TheOneZozo: yeah, it's like 46 degrees here
[12:10 AM] Christine C: waat?
[12:10 AM] Christine C: thats like the same here, if not warmer!
[12:10 AM] TheOneZozo: yes we have been having a heat wave here
...
[12:12 AM] TheOneZozo: and by heat wave, i mean it's been above 23 degrees for the past week
...
[12:13 AM] TheOneZozo: yeah, it's been above freezing for at least the past 36 hours

around fourscore years ago

You know why there were so many more great speeches in history than there are today? Because people like Lincoln, Churchill, and Roosevelt never had PowerPoint...

you sure this is the right road?

It goes without saying that there are more pleasant experiences than 13 hours in a car with five people and a dog. But that's all over now. This Christmas was even more surreal than the last. Watching Grandpa drown his miseries in drink was a new experience for me.

As was driving his car back to Michigan and listening to my little brother gripe about how he was getting "an old people car" to drive. The object of his complaints? A 96 Oldsmobile with barely 30,000 miles we brought back from Connecticut as a third car for him to drive this summer and take back to school for sophomore year. In my book, this is a big upgrade over the old "shitbox": power windows, power door locks, cruise control, working wipers, not getting the shakes at 5 mph...and even a tape player and a clock. Of course it does look kinda boxy. But still, much better than the imaginary car I have at Stanford...

We had dinner at the Bamboo Club, one of those trendy postmodern restaurants that thrive in suburbia. It's one of those places where the waiters and waitresses are all wearing black, the lights are so dim you can't read the menus, and some sort of modern dance beat of definite non-Asian origin is thumping in the background. (To its credit, it did in fact have a few bunches of tall bamboo and reproductions of a few Chinese paintings on the walls.) The food was pretty good, although not too authentic--more of a "fusion" of the entire Pacific Rim. And... right across from a new Coldstone, which opened just in time for winter. Opening an ice cream place in an outdoor mall, hundreds of yards away from the nearest parking space, in Michigan in October...now that's gutsy.

A certain someone has been complaining about SoCal getting "cold". And well she should be: LA got down to a bone-chilling 44 degrees yesterday. And I thought it was cold when 19 Fahrenheit degrees greeted me as I stepped out of the airport--without winter coat, I might add...

the official Christmas Eve post

Yes, I'm sitting here at my grandparents' house patiently waiting for my e-mail to chug through their painful dialup connection (and "testing" the reliability of AOL 9). It's been a busy few days.

Sunday I went dancing in Ann Arbor. Funny, but after three years of living on the West Coast I'd never learned the so-called "West Coast swing". Not my favorite, but still interesting.

Monday I reunited with a bunch of high school friends at the real Mongolian Barbeque (not that pathetic thing on Castro). We ended up playing Clue at Coffee Trader till midnight... good times. Of course, when I got home I discovered I had to get my room ready for a showing and wrap some gifts on top of packing. So I ended up sleeping only two hours.

Tuesday morning, ten minutes before the alarm was set to go off at 4 AM I hear Grandpa knocking on the door, fully dressed and ready to go. We set out by 4:30, and finally made it to Connecticut around 5 PM, following the same route we've taken every year for the past 20 years. Of course, that didn't stop Grandpa from advising whoever was driving to pull over and ask for directions every five minutes or so...

So now I'm here. Pepere (French for Grandfather) is out of the hospital and doing well, happily ranting about his doctors and any and all Democrats. Within ten minutes of walking in the door Memere dragged me in front of her computer...

It's weird; I'd always spent Christmas at Grandpa's house. and that's where Santa came every year. So it seemed somehow fitting that I found myself vacuuming it out on Christmas Eve. Barring any pending legal action, that shall be the last time I set foot in his house.

Getting kicked off... Well, Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

the end of an era

The Silver Bullet (later The Shitbox)	1990 - 2003 (mine 1999 - 2003)

It's gone. My first car, the humble Eagle Summit pictured here (no longer made, making this a "classic" I guess), christened "the shitbox" by my grandfather, got donated today. It was running well (if a bit underpowered), surviving 20,000 miles and even a couple accidents under the watchful care of my brother and me. But then Mom drove it one day and now instead of getting the shakes at 70 like it used to, it gets them at 5.

Speaking of cars, an article in today's Detroit Free Press reports that while Detroit is in danger of losing its title as the tenth largest city in America to San Jose, it has reclaimed its dubious distinction as the country's most dangerous city. And that's with the lowest homicide count since 1968, folks (and not coincidentally the lowest city population since 1968). (To add insult to injury, San Jose is also the safest big city.) It also boasts the highest pedestrian fatality rate. (Pedestrians must make easy targets since it's the third-fattest city in the US.) No wonder it's baseball players' least favorite city to visit. Indeed, it's a great time in Detroit. Fewer than one million people can't be wrong.

Happy winter...

Yes, indeed. Of course, here since it's above freezing it feels more November-like.

the culinary wonders of novi

Obligatory big Christmassy shot to the left.

The morning began with a flash of deja vu as a vacuum cleaner roared in the hall at 8:30 AM. Determined not to let my family's attempt to rouse me before my 8 hours of sleep were through (see Kathy? I'm trying...) I rolled over and slept till 10. After a shower, I spent an hour making my room look like no one lived in it for our house showing.

People will do funny things all of a sudden when they're about to sell a house. They'll clean fastidiously, as if necessary to paint the illusion that it's self-cleaning. They'll replace carpet to remove stains that haven't bothered them in years. They'll go on decorating binges to buy crap they haven't felt a need for at any time since moving in simply because of the appearance it conveys.

This showing was conveniently scheduled at lunch time, so we fled to the mall, Novi's principal Thing To Do. Six days before Christmas, this was a big mistake. The first warning sign was a line of cars spilling out onto the right lane on Novi Road, all waiting for a car wash to get rid of that winter grime that coats everything and slowly turns car bodies to rust.

Next came the fight to get down the little boulevard to the ring road encircling the mall. Then the parking. Oakland County is famous for gargantuan parking lots that would bring a Californian to tears, but most every space was filled.

As we entered we were contemplating one of the sit-down restaurants. The line extending out of Olga's put an end to that. Instead we made our way to the food court, where long lines greeted us everywhere except Shish Kabob Express. One of the few things I miss about this area is the relative abundance of Mediterranean food. So long since my last lamb shawarma... even the fast food version was tantalizing.

Grandpa insisted on taking us out to dinner one last time before we headed to Connecticut. So we ended up at the China Cafe. This is one of those places where less than five percent of the customers are Chinese, they only give you chopsticks if you ask, and they specialize in dishes with white wine sauce. (The term for this is "Asian-WASP fusion". I say Asian because this restaurant also serves a limited array of Korean food. Thus you can say there are 3/4 of a Korean restaurant in town.) The food's not bad though; I'd just been spoiled with two trips to Cupertino in the last month.

When we got home Grandpa declared it time for bed at 7:30, so I settled down with a book. Yes, a book. Not a textbook. And I started reading. For pleasure. The novel? Arthur Clarke's 2061. Yes, I'm a dork. But hey, it's pretty good for long-winded Clarke.

Revelation of the evening: Will Farrell's been in some pretty dumb SNL sketches.

the king hath returned

Just got back from Return of the King. Wow. Impressive. And the ending... well, the first ending was pretty sweet. Then the second one, nice. Around the fifth ending I was kinda waiting... I know all this stuff (and a lot more) was at the end of the book but in the cinema, you only get one chance to make a good ending...

The rest of the day was spent planning for my coterm proposal. I've come to the realization that if I want to do it in three quarters I'll need to take 15 units of CS each quarter. Not exactly appealing. And grad quarters cost more too. So I'm looking for ways to finance taking an extra quarter to knock the others down to that magic 10 limit and have time to TA or section lead. I'm starting to see why grad students have no lives...

I figured our dog deserved his own photo sooner or later. And in my stubborn attempt to get you to use Mozilla, I will again point out the alpha-blended shadow. (This really will probably only last until I go back to school and get too lazy for this.)

there be snow here

If you have Mozilla, the photo looks even cooler. Really now, check it out. That drop shadow just blends with the background... Yes, I'm bored. I'm shoveling snow and taking pictures of it, for crying out loud.

This small dusting of snow greeted me this morning.

Still haven't seen Return of the King yet. But here's the weird thing: My parents really really want to see it. They're insisting on going with me. And since most of my Michigan friends still aren't done with exams yet, I guess I'm going with them. But I'm at the point where I don't care. Being too cool to be seen with your parents in public was so...middle school...

Leave me some feedback on the redesign. I'm open to suggestions. How many UI guidelines have I violated with this page?

Ah, vacation...

Sitting inside listening to Christmas carols in Polish that no one understands, watching deer romp in the empty dirt fields that used to be woodlands next door. Seeing the dog throw up on the rug (it's instinctive: never throw up on the linoleum or the wood floor... aim for the harder-to-clean rugs...). Yes, I'm back at my parents' house.

The house is on the market so it mus be kept spotless, even though it only gets shown once a week or so. Of course, no one wants to buy it since the barren trees expose the neighborhood being built next door.

Yesterday I spent more money than I ever had in a Borders at once. It felt good somehow, as if I were somehow supporting the largest and best bookstore in Novi. (And even then, it's only one floor. Kinda sad...) Whenever I go to pay the credit card bill I'll surely feel worse, but still.

Sadly, most all the snow has washed away in the rain. Kathy was so proud to inform me that her corner of Arkansas got down to 27 a few nights ago. But then it proceeded to shoot into the 50s the next day. Here it broke the freezing point for the first time since I'd been back today. Hence the disappearing snow. I really don't mind the snow. If it's going to be cold, there might as well be snow because then it's at least pretty to look at. Now it just looks wet. And it's going to freeze overnight. But it might snow tonight. (The official forecast calls for a "wintry mix", just like in the perennial Christmas classic: "Let it mix! Let it mix! Let it mix!")

Back at station No. VI

Ah yes. Where it really is freezing cold (27 F right now; for Yune's benefit, -something C), and there's a dusting of snow to prove it. (But only a dusting, fortunately.)

I finished Friday at 3 PM. I was so happy I proceeded to spend the next 24 hours hanging with friends I've neglected for the last three weeks. Then six hours cleaning and packing (yes, my floor is actually clean now; thanks Cheng for the bookshelves!) and it was off to the airport. Almost. Our shuttle didn't come but someone else's did for a group that already left. So we stole it, along with Hasper (whose still hadn't come after an hour). How these people manage to survive except by preying on our fears of the Caltrain I'll never know.

I proceeded to sleep for 12 hours straight that night. It felt good. My mom thankfully exercised the restraint to keep herself from waking me at 6:30 to see the snow falling. As if I had never seen snow...

Today I went to the mall that is the centerpiece of Novi. It was just suffocating in yuppieness. Really this place is like Palo Alto with snow. I must get to Ann Arbor soon.

It's finally happened...

Our 7-year campaign to bring zesty! into vernacular for cool has finally paid off. So beautiful. So very beautiful.

I like bots.

Oh, and by the way: I never applied to Cal. Not even as a safety school. Damn weenies. (Some other people apparently feel the same way, much like me.) I really don't get why people think it's so cool to call it Kal.

Note: All the ads on Rose's blog seem to be related to sleep disorders for some reason...

You know the economy's bouncing back when...

1. People actually believe you'd go to a McCafe for a cappucino.
2. Said McCafe opens in Palo Alto.
3. Said McCafe is advertised on a billboard truck.

Yes, those lovable billboard trucks, last seen three years ago advertising pets.com on the Oval, are back on campus. The one I passed today revealed that, yes, you could get foam on a coffee drink from McDonald's. Really now. Having been to the McCafe in Kyoto I must say, they're just like every other McDonald's, but classier. Really this is how I expect every McDonald's in Palo Alto or Atherton to look...

Another economic indicator: Apple is promoting CS193E on campus, a course that teaches how to program for...Apple. That's right, learn skills that will qualify you for a job at Apple and just about nowhere else. Now where would you publicize such a course? Gates? The CS mailing list? Of course not...at the bookstore! The synergy is subtle: aspiring Jobs underlings need to first buy a big expensive G5 tower, then take 193E.

collecting the garbage

Ah, that was pleasurable. I had a nice little breakfast of coffee and donuts at 8:30 AM, in Hewlett. The TA continued his power trip by refusing to let us have exams until he personally verified that our books were closed. Then he announced the donuts were late and left us to start. Ten minutes later he returned with three boxes of donuts--not a token of his compassion but of our prof's (the same one who made us all CS 242 ROCKS pencils...and then in a surely unrelated move, handed out the course evals). He glanced around at all of us, who were still busy with the exam but now being tempted by sugar. Then he took a donut and left, smirking. He came back twice more to do the same thing, shaking his head as we battled our willpower.

All in all it could have been worse. Though I wanted to strangle the guy whose 10-minute "question" in class based on a paper only he had read turned into a 10-point problem.

Why do 16-year-old girls keep seeking me out? Apparently they assume that that there's onl y one Mike Brzozowski on ICQ (not an entirely unreasonable assumption, I guess...)

[01:43] 175530981: mike???
[01:43] Zozo: who is this???
[01:43] 175530981: neesha u loser lol
[01:44] Zozo: um, wanna be more specific? i don't remember any neeshas
[01:46] 175530981: Isnt this mike Brzozowski lol
[01:46] Zozo: it is... but i don't know any neeshas
[01:47] 175530981: oo...lol sorry i feel like such an idiot lol ur not the mike that went to st. paul last year?
[01:48] Zozo: nope
[01:48] 175530981: opp's lol sorry hehe!

I could never be a pedophile... the giggly dialogue was driving me mad after five minutes...

cs242 away message gallery

From Doug:

Away Message: Dear John Bitchell,
You may take away my GPA, but you can never take away that night I type checked your MOM

Sincerely,
Me

From me:

in less than 24 hours, cs242 will be over. nil. ended. halted. finished. finalized. destructed. garbage collected.

Ahh, we are such dorks...

Post-Dead Week destresser: Wal-Mart?

Yes, I squandered a few hours there, mostly helping Cheng in his quest for empty boxes and waiting in line. I hate that place. But I think got the last laugh as I managed to steal one of their precious shopping carts--the ones that "suddenly stop" if you take them past the yellow line. With a running start I was doing pretty well...until I hit a manhole cover. Nevertheless the cart still had one working wheel, so I managed to get it to the car and back. A couple patrons were so impressed by my shopping cart finesse (and perhaps by the fact that I was actually bringing a cart back) they thought I worked there.

Dead Week is at last over, culminating in two mad dashes to Gates to turn stuff in just past the deadline. Now it's time to, ah, study for finals?

Google can find most anything.

Like those elusive weapons of mass destruction perhaps?

Sleep counter:
Wednesday: 3 (accidental) hours
Thursday: 0 hours

In other news I managed to successfully bike my suitcase all the way back from Sweet Hall. I was most proud of myself. Granted, it took me a month to drag my lazy butt over there, but still...

Electrical engineering gets sketchy...

I can just see the EE geeks drooling now. What happens when you combine lasers and Spears: Britney Spears guide to Semiconductor Physics.

Thursday I went to the GSC Thanksgiving dinner at Wilbur. Most food I'd ever eaten at Wilbur... and definitely the most grad students I'd ever seen in one place. While it's a well known fact that free food is the most surefire way to lure grad students out of hiding, it's still impressive to see. The food itself wasn't bad, although the mood was definitely changed this year--they were carefully portioning out exactly three pieces of white meat to everyone.

Which was definitely made up for on Friday. Yune and I headed down (up?) to San Francisco for dinner in North Beach and improv on the bay. BATS is always fun, especially when they're facing off in teams. And San Francisco is not Palo Alto--at 11 PM, much to our joy, Ghiradelli Square was still open. Somehow Yune had lived in the Bay Area for three years and been to SF five times and still never experienced Ghiradelli, so naturally we rectified this.

On the Caltrain we ran into these people from Notre Dame who were so impressed and amazed by, well, the Caltrain. Apparently South Bend lacks major commuter transit. I felt so jaded. Of course, we were so impressed and amazed by a football team with a winning record...

Poor little mammoth...

Proof that English-language sites don't have a monopoly on bizarre Web phenomena. Lifted from Becky's away message.

"The tiny mammoth wanted to fly. He tried and he tried but he couldn't fly. He went and cried to a duck, and from the fifth floor he made him jump off... What happened? Shit. The mammoth turned to shit..."

Tuesday, 11 hours.
Wednesday, 0 hours.
Wednesday night-Thursday, 12 hours! So exciting...

Upperclass dorms are so dead silent over Thanksgiving. It's so eerie without the familiar pot and loud guitar riffs or boisterous drinking that usually marks this end of the hall...

Everything's funnier when you haven't slept

Ragtime was really the highlight of my weekend. It was fun, albeit ridiculously crowded. Come on, people, Big Game weekend isn't for dancing, it's for getting drunk, defacing public property, and rioting. When will you learn?

Ragtime was also the only time I emerged from my room, save for eating and my Lair hours. Mr. Othello and I were having some quality moments.

Saturday, 3 1/2 hours.
Sunday, 3 hours.
Monday, 1/2 hour.

OK, so I ducked out of our all-night mad coding party to go stop by a neighbor's party. It really amazes me how some people can't even conceive of having to do work on a weekend. (I've long since gotten over the fact that some people never seem to have this problem... but it seems you'd have to have a pretty narrow social crowd not to be aware of this.)

What really irks me though, are the people who think engineering is some sick addiction, that we really do want to spend hours on end parked in front of our computers and problem sets. We're people too, dammit... and it's not that we don't want to have lives.

That takes care of rants for the weekend. Today Othello was due at noon, thus ending our computer-shackled bondage. We'd all gotten together for one last coding party and we'd all gotten so little sleep we were getting to the point where anything was funny. So around 11, we make the discovery that our AI player gets completely wiped out, spectacularly losing on some of the test cases we're graded on. Naturally, with the deadline approaching we all start freaking out, frantically digging through our project to find any blaring bugs. At 11:55 we decided to replace our training weights, the results of a week's painstaking work, with the hand-tuned weights Guy randomly chose a week ago. But it still didn't seem to be working. Panicked, we submitted and went to lunch, thinking we had just bombed big time on this project.

So imagine our surprise when we go to examine what we did wrong and find out... we were looking at the wrong side! We'd gotten all worked up about the fact that Red was losing 0-91 and forgot that, well, we were White. And those random weights? In ten seconds, Guy had outfoxed three days' worth of reinforcement learning.

In short, it all comes down to this: machine learning is only better than human learning because machines don't need sleep...

The sun shines brighter after a good night's sleep

Friday, 8 hours. W00t! In a bed, no less.

The main reason, admittedtly, was the Microsoft interview I had this morning. Which seemed to go well. Though it's impossible to tell with these things, because like so much, it depends on the curve. At least with an exam you know how many points each question's worth.

Why do I feel so ridiculous carrying a backpack, wearing a shirt and tie?

I don't have to sleep till Monday now... in theory at least...

Now there's a job idea...

I must say, I never considered this...

Thursday, 4 hours. In a chair. Accidentally.

What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?

As with all great rhetorical questions, some engineer has come up with the answer: 24 miles per hour. For those who don't get the reference...

Tuesday, 6 hours
Wednesday, 4 hours

Proof that Windows is the Matrix...

and Bill Gates as Morpheus? Messed up on so many levels. Oh what I wouldn't give for video of this...

Sleep log for the week so far:
Monday, 5 hours

Othello, that dastardly moore of Venice that he is, has come for my soul. Won't he be disappointed to find it's being eaten by my *other* CS classes. Maybe he'll just settle for my sleep instead.

In other news, I've now regained all my worldly possessions from Japan and my computer too. And by "regained", I mean they're all unpacked. They actually arrived three weeks ago at the height of midterms and just sat in boxes until procrastination overrode laziness and I started putting stuff away. It's a great way to procrastinate: when I'm too lethargic to work, I just start cleaning my room. Before too long I'm so sick of it I'm almost psyched to do work.

And it's Big Game week. I'd like to go to Big Sing and Gaeties, but I'm not really pumped up about the game, especially given that we just lost horribly to a team Cal defeated not too long ago. I never really did figure out what was so thrilling about sitting around watching a game that mostly consists of waiting for a 20-second plays. Ah well... But we'll see what Mr. Othello has to say about those plans for this week.

Boosting that does something useful

As if I hadn't had enough AI for the day, Erika pointed me to a great procrastination tool: Gnod, a site that recommends bands, authors, or movies based on what you tell it you like and don't like. The scary thing is, I think I almost understand how it works. It also has a nifty feature that generates maps to show how similar two items are. (Did you know Matrix fans tend to hate Sleepless in Seattle? Or that Michael Crichton readers tend to love Dr. Seuss?) Combined with iTunes and the most excellent hack MyTunes you can wile away hours discovering new music. If only iTunes let you search across your network of users... then it'd be almost like KaZaA...

Why didn't I have my camera?

As I was biking by Forsythe (taking the patented "funk-ass way" back), I saw this odd neon green sign that caught my attention. So I paused to look at it. It said "Disaster Preparedness Drill In Progress: Pneumonic Plague Scenario". Of course, the first time I read it in my sleepless delirium I thought it said "bubonic plague". But still, of all the euphemisms you could think of for "bioterrorist attack", plague definitely isn't top on the reassuring nothing-to-worry-about-folks-everything's-under-control list--it sounds so epic. I looked around, half expecting hazmat squads and people in gas masks, but didn't notice anything unusual; Forsythe seemed its usual sedate self.

So rest assured: if the black plague makes a comeback, your phones will still work.

what have i done to accrue such bad computing karma?

So i finally got my sick desktop back. I went to go set it up, thinking it'd just take an hour or so.

Mistake #1.

10 PM. Plug it in, boot it up, install that RPC patch. Note this was the first thing I did.
The CD instructs me to reboot and run Windows Update. Which I do, since there's another RPC patch I need. Only trouble is there are like 25 MB of "critical" updates I need for this machine. Which, of course, I download like a good little Microsoft lemming.

It also turns out I need to activate Windows. Fine, I muse, as the updates download. Mistake #2. So I painstakingly key in that ghastly 30-character product key, only to be rejected. I need Microsoft's explicit permission to use Windows. So I call and start reading off an even longer 45-digit number over a cell phone. Mistake #3. The automated voice couldn't understand me so I eventually start typing in numbers the old-fashioned way. I finally get them all in when the voice decides to disconnect me, as if to spite me for not wanting to talk to it.

When I finally get a human to talk to I got the third degree, since this being my second activation in the past month, it looked as if I either got my kicks by installing Windows or was pirating Windows on three machines. I'm reminded why I never bought Office XP (or 2000, for that matter...) Eventually, Microsoft bestows on me the privilege of running Windows by giving me another 30-digit code to enter. I finally reboot. Everything's happy. I even download a firewall and antivirus software to complete my newfound sense of security. Mistake #4.

All of a sudden my Internet connection dies. Sort of. OK, I figure, as a seasoned Windows user, I'll just restart. Mistake #5. Windows doesn't want to reboot completely. So I start freaking out in my sleep-deprived state, suspecting this has something to do with that RPC vulnerability. I shut down the computer and start hunting around for an antivirus disc to boot from, which gives me a clean bill of health. E-mail sent to RCC at 1 AM reporting suspiciousness.

Next I wanted to determine that it wasn't Windows screwing up. So I boot into Linux (off a CD, since the people who fixed my computer decided I wouldn't need the Linux that was on my hard drive and conveniently obliterated it for me), to find, lo and behold, that I can't connect from there either.

Eventually I discovered that I can boot...every 3rd or 4th try. And I eventually found out the reason why this minty-fresh Windows install is flaking out is that it can't connect to some important server. And the reason it can't connect is I've been blackholed. (Nice of them to tell me... eventually I was moaning to Jim, an RCC from outside Potter, who tipped me off to this underhanded practice.)

Yes, me, the innocent CS major who installed all the patches, and even firewalled off the RPC ports to make sure, got blackholed. See, during my half-hour Microsoft lovefest with Windows Update and Product Activation, ITSS port-scanned me and discovered one of the holes hadn't been patched yet. So they put me on the blacklist--even though I closed off that port entirely afterwards. It seems I fixed the problem too well with my firewall.

So now it's 2 AM and I'm sitting here, grumpily listening to 98 Degrees from "Benny-pod" because iTunes is the only Internet app that still works. (Clearly our priorities are in line.) I'm waiting for ITSS to scan my system through the little back door I left for them. But even though it took them only half an hour to block my system they report it may take 25 hours for them to unblock it.

If this is what I'm like on 5 hours of sleep this week is going to be very interesting...

Word...

Courtesy of Yune: The End of the World! Why I find this amusing I don't know... perhaps because it's at least as plausible as the last Matrix movie...

Maybe this election will be fun too...

The Democratic primary's shaping up to be as amusing as the 2000 election... the debate in Detroit was getting to SNL-grade material

GOOD DAY

Attn my friend,
With due respect and huminity I propose this to you. I wrote to you last time no response and I decided to write you again.

Now that my filter catches messages like this, it's easy to miss how amusing spam can be. Just think of all the opportunities I'm missing out, like this "businness proposal" to get access to the funds in a mysterious Benin bank. I've heard all about how I can Get 12 CDs for the Price of 1!, just about every Home Business Opportunity, or how Wk can make it longkr (damn those scientists for discovering people can dkciphir silgthly gorbled werds... now every spammer's doing it). But the conversational tone of this guy struck me as nice...and it almost fooled my spam filter.

The spammiest word in the entire message? Letter, whose presence my filter says indicates a 96% chance of being spam. Isn't that sad? Apparently the whole notion of letter-writing has vanished from my contacts' e-mail vocabulary... Other particularly spammy words: discovery, respect, and verification. Now what does that say about how academic my e-mail is?

Looking for the perfect woman?

Why bother with degrading beauty pageants, wasting your time on humans, when you can drool over virtual women instead? Before you think this might just be some unprincipled shallow competition for male computer geeks who need to get out more, consider the stringent criteria for virtual models:

"They should not have taken part -- not even as extras or cameos -- in pornographic films, shows or plays nor have made statements ... in any way out of tune with the moral spirit of the competition."

Thank you for the interview

Thank you so much for taking the time to interview with me yesterday. I enjoyed the opportunity to meet you and your colleagues, as well as visit your worksite. I was impressed with the quality of the facilities and the overall attitude of the employees.

After speaking with you, I am even more enthusiastic about the opportunity of working as a code monkey. Though I have enjoyed my previous experience as a student researcher, the workload of current projects and the non-stop, high-stress philosophy of the design teams you described offer an exciting new dimension in software engineering for me. I work well in a fast-paced, dark windowless environment, and appreciate the opportunity not only to code but devote my entire day to it from dawn to well after dusk. My experience in CS 221 and 248 exposed me to this "work-life balance", and I feel confident that I can apply that experience to the demands of this position.

Thank you for considering me for the code monkey position. I look forward to hearing from you. Please express my appreciation to your colleagues for leaving their screens to meet with me and share their perspectives. In the meantime, good luck with your weekend coding marathon!

Trick. Or is it treat?

Best thrill of the morning:
Submitting our CS 221 program at 11:59:58 AM, yes, that's right, two seconds before it's due. Talk about pressure... cause unlike every other submit script I had to manually type in everyone's e-mail addresses as the clock was ticking... But thus ends a sleep-depriving chapter of the month.

Best thrill of the night:

The pictures are all up for your viewing pleasure. Operation Haunted Cake was a definite success as we celebrated Cheng's graduation from adolescence. This guy's going to have his masters before he can drink...it seems somehow wrong. I feel like such an underachiever...

Hella: why?

Hella (HEL-ah) adv., Very, extremely, in large quantity. “There’s hella candy in the cabinet.” “That girl is hella fine.” “That jacket is hella clean.” (Also: helluv) [Etym., combination of “hell” and “of,” Berkeley]
Wow, California slang is hella jankity... (Link jacked from Dave's profile)

Screwing the RIAA and living to tell about it

MIT students have an answer.

holy sh*t. someone famous living here?

The governor of California might be moving here. According to a front-page article in an abandoned copy of the Palo Alto Daily News I just picked up, someone named Arnold Schwarzenegger, a quiet SoCal politician most famous for promising to "pump up California", is looking for a home in Atherton. Described by many as a simple, humble man, Schwarzenegger is eschewing the governor's official mansion in Sacramento to live with the common people he promises to represent as he schedules California's budget crisis for termination. In Atherton, one of the wealthiest cities in the nation, where he can move into a $7 million-home neighborhood with the five people in the Bay Area who actually voted for him. Then, like many of his constituents making the Central Valley-Silicon Valley commute, he can choose between driving his Hummer to the Capitol or taking his private jet. After all, he says, an hour by jet isn't much different from spending an hour in traffic.

Anyone have any idea how the PADN can come up with 72 pages of news every single day? Granted it's mostly ads, but still... I shudder to think about a 72-page Stanford Daily...

You haven't lived...

...until you've watched the sun come up.

From Sweet Hall.

The second floor cluster has windows all along two walls. So you can watch the sun set... and come up... all without getting up. So it's no wonder the EE grad students and CS geeks prefer to close the blinds, to hide from this natural light (or blackness) outside. But it sure beats the windowless raptor pit.

At 8 AM, the morning sun casts a soft golden glow on the empty chairs and idling workstations, as if beckoning to those of us still there.

It's recursion!

In my artsy mood (or even as a techie), this is just plain cool. Ripped off of Erika's kitten of doom.

Octoberfest

It's a warm 70-degree day. The sun is shining.

And yet, it's fall.

So? say the Californians. My apologies, but growing up somewhere where there could just as easily be snow on the ground in late October, I'm still impressed. (In fact, on the left you can see just how balmy it is there right now.) As I was biking back from Gates, a gentle breeze was blowing the few leaves that had started to fall alongside me almost cinematographically, as if straight out of a movie scene.

Up until now I hadn't really noticed that fall had actually begun. After all, here in NorCal we still have green throughout the winter. So what changes in the fall, you ask? My parents lamented that you don't get the leaves changing in the fall here, but they're just in a Midwest winter-induced denial. In all fairness they have high standards: New England and Michigan falls where the leaves explode in a vibrant cornucopia of orange and red. It is truly breathtaking--for about a week. Because that's all it lasts; within days, leaves go from green to red to on the ground, as if they all conspired to jump off the trees on the same day. I distinctly remember the days when it was just raining leaves in our backyard, much to our dismay as we had to collect them all before they got buried under a foot of snow.

But here fall is much slower, and for a good month or two you can watch individual leaves slowly turn colors. I'd never seen this before, and it really is beautiful--the streets are lined with green, yellow, orange, and red. And if you don't believe me, come check out GovCo--where we actually have trees of the non-palm persuasion--or go up to Hoover Tower.

Now if only I didn't have a paper due tomorrow so I could go enjoy this...

it's just like xanga, only better

Now you can get e-mailed when I update my blog using the yellow form on the left. As Yune pointed out, it doesn't e-mail you the instant I update--for that you need to keep clicking Refresh every few seconds. But it should coalesce a day's random rants into one notice within 24 hours. A nice happy medium for Windows users that I'm fond of is WebMon, which lets you check a bunch of pages with one click, whenever you're in a procrastinating surfing mode anyway--or you could set it to check for updates every minute if you're that obsessive I suppose... but in that case you might need help.

CS around the clock

Sigh. I got up at 8, went to CS class #1, went to work on a problem set for CS class #2, went to class #2, went to lunch (at Tressider, mind you), went to class #3, napped for 20 minutes in the Gates library, worked some more on class #2's problem set, went to office hours for class #2, then went to Monday Meeting for the CS class I'm course helping, then went to grade for class #2, then came back to work with a study group on said problem set for class #2. I think I spent 9 hours in Gates today. I feel so dirty...

Grading problem sets, let me tell you, is a singularly annoying experience mitigated only by the fact that a) I was getting paid, b) I was getting food, and c) we were joking around the whole time. Key insight: If you expect sympathy on a pset, you're not going to get it by writing pages and pages of indecipherable cursive. In fact, if you want to be appreciated as an engineer, forget cursive altogether. Please. The sooner, the better. On the flipside, just because you went to the trouble to typeset it in LaTeX (a cryptic tool used by profs to do all those equations in psets and exams in that ugly font), or printed out a stylish cover page for this 3-page opus, doesn't make you right either.

So right now, it's only fitting that I be amused by things like this: How NOT to install computer hardware

Secrets of the GRE

Amazing secrets the test makers don't want you to know about!

1. The San Jose test center is right across the street from Saratoga's Japanese shopping nexus. Yes, that's right, you can take your GRE and get a teapot, ramen, and melon soda just like I did.
   
2. You're not supposed to eat in the waiting room or the exam room... but there's no one looking when you're on your break.
   
3. The key they give you for your locker opens everyone else's too.
   
4. That annoying squeaking you hear taking the test is that one girl taking the TOEFL having a nervous twitchy foot she can't hear through her headphones.
   

Now there's an idea...

I suppose if you're really desperate, but still... ouch! Granted, I don't really know how bad Korean accents can be, but is this the only way?
A Short Cut to Better Spoken English

Unequivocally assauging my trepidation

After some fervid last-minute studying, I must say I feel much more erudite now than I did before I embarked on this capricious GRE binge of mine. It's well known that above all, ostentatious words engender the verbal section, so why do I feel like such a pedant for memorizing them? Sorry, I meant no ostentation here. My blog's just ordinarily so laconic that I thought it'd be laudable if I tried to use all the top 20 GRE words, many of which lack the propriety to ever use in all but the most garrulous of conversations, in this loquacious-sounding entry. Over the past three months or so, I've vacillated between apathy and zeal (or some might even say, zest?) for preparing for this exam, which I'm taking tomorrow... or later today. In 12 hours. Woo...

But it's all good.

The CS department only cares about my math score (what? techies don't have to write...), for which I'm soo grateful. Maybe I should write my essays about monkeys, and as Rose suggests, "big fat whores", just for fun.

The simple truth of college life: procrastination = blogging

I got back to my room 40 minutes ago with a simple goal: take a 10-minute nap, then finish the CS 221 problem set. As you've probably guessed by now, the nap became 20 minutes, and I'm still not motivated to finish the pset. Maybe blogging will get my creativity going... then again, maybe it'll lead me into a spiral of distraction for another hour until I realize that I still have a pset due in 12 hours...

It was an emotional moment today at 4:57 PM as a whole bunch of us from CS 242 appeared outside what my professor happened to call the Lockbox to turn our problem sets in. It didn't help that the way he said it I just kept thinking of Darrell Hammond and a certain SNL sketch, back from better carefree times. Times when we only joked about electing incompetent leaders with no experience. More importantly, times when SNL was actually good...

The one good thing about job searching is free stuff. Companies are hiring again, and they're willing to splurge for the pizza to boot. So I've found myself among the herds at info sessions for Microsoft, Google, and the like. The format is the same: we all cram into a Gates conference room to listen to casually clad recruiters tell us why we want to join their elite club, then we all mob him or her at the end, striving to give away our resumes and make a good impression on the recruiter in the hopes that he/she will remember our faces a month from now when our painstakingly formatted resumes have been scanned into a database.

But fall recruiting season so far has yielded: two T-shirts, two pens, a yo-yo, a mousepad, post-it notes, a light-up keychain, and...a pocket PC! I rarely win anything, but I did win a nice shiny new Toshiba PDA. Not exactly the sort of thing I'd splurge on with my limited funds (oh do I sound like a grad student already) but always nice to have. So now I can tap away in the middle of lecture, surreptitiously checking my e-mail, or check my calendar like some sort of true Valley geek.

In other mobile news, I've discovered I can log onto AIM on my cell phone. And, sadly, I am guilty of having sent a remarkably lucid message while barreling down Santa Teresa on my bike. Supposedly my icon should change to a little cell phone. But I don't really know if this whole text messaging thing is worth the trouble. But it is cool... something else I can do in those lecture halls without wireless...

Wow, people still read this... maybe I should post...

So here I am sitting at the Tressider Lair on the slowest night I've ever seen. No complaints from me. Since I was a dolt and left all my homework behind at the dorm, I figured it's worth an update.

Being back in the US is great. I can blow my nose whenever I want, walk down the street eating a candy bar and not feel like I'm committing a sin, walk down the sidewalk without getting run over by bikers (well, maybe not)...

I settled on only 11 units of real classwork. But probably 3 or maybe even 4 of them are CS221. (Units are the greatest lie ever in the engineering department.) But don't worry, I'm taking 4 units of dance to get back up to the respectable 15. On the side I'm working as a CS106 course helper, tutoring E40, and oh yes, making preparations for The Future. This means I have a GRE in two weeks I need to cram for, and career fairs to traipse through for a Plan B.

Senior year sucks. So somehow it's fitting that every Thursday there's Senior Don't-Call-It-Pub Night.

But in other news, I finally caved and got a cell phone. It's a basic crappy phone (and the subject of a big usability rant in my first CS147 project), with, alas, no camera. But what can I say, I'm still sitting here in the Lair, waving my phone around like I'm sweeping for a bomb trying to get enough signal to collect IMs I received. And, I must confess: I was texting while biking. I claim to have a good excuse though.

So I said that would be my last post. Well, I lied. Yahoo! is giving me free broadband in Japan one last time... at the airport in Tokyo. I spent Friday night making a mad dash to get the apartment cleaned up and back to Kyoto. Saturday I slept, shopped, and partied until I had to leave for the overnight bus. Apparently I missed a certain girl from Okayama getting completely wasted afterwards, but fear not, it:s all preserved on Tim:s camera...

I ate so well this weekend. Izakaya, tofu, (Japanese) McDonald:s, all-you-can-eat shabu shabu and sukiyaki, toast with Hokkaido milk jam, Mos Burger, Hokkaido beer, Hokkaido corn, and eel.

Maybe I should have been more concerned about the fact that the Lawson people sending my suitcase to the airport didn:t seem to know what they were doing. I told them clearly that I needed it to be at Narita for a flight today, and they asked me what time, and I told them. I had them look over the form. All three of the clerks looked at this form. I thought the extra attention would mean they should take care of any problems.

So I:m getting ready to go this morning and I get a call from Eiko. Lawson had my luggage sent to...the Stanford Center? Seems the form had the sending and receiving addresses switched, although neither the three Lawson people nor the takkyubin company thought it odd that a big suitcase was being sent from Nara with a return address of a JAL flight from Tokyo that hadn:t happened yet...

I get to the airport and discover that I can get the flight changed to tomorrow for free, and use Tim:s JR pass to get back to Kyoto for free to pick it up. So I:m all prepared to do that when Christine discovered that even though she had mailed stuff to the US already, her suitcase (and by suitcase, I mean body bag) was seven kilos overweight. The only way she could get it all back was if I checked a bag of her stuff.

Let me just say that Eiko is the bomb. She:s going to ship my stuff to me, repacking it into two smaller suitcases because it:s too big. And...she used her ninja powers of mind control to get Lawson to pay for it. So I:ll hopefully get my luggage back in two months.

Lessons Learned from the Japanese:

• Only one bathroom in Tokyo-eki is open at 6:30 AM. And the escalators down to it don:t work. Grr...
  
• All white guys look alike. Which leads me to my next point,
  
• Apparently, I look like Keanu Reeves (despite having neither the same color hair nor eyes) and JFK.
  
• White guys can:t use chopsticks either.
  
• You can fit a lot of luggage in 32 kg. But Christine can somehow try to bring more back.
  

Y:arrgh. But this time tomorrow I:ll be in the (dry) sun of California... whoo hoo!

Well, the time has come. I'm packing away my modem and giving up my free broadband. I might be going nearly nine days without an Internet connection. So it may be a while before you hear from me.

Japan's been great, and I've had a great time hanging out with everyone except Mike Orme, who gives me cancer every time I see him.

My experiences as a gaijin wandering Japan will etched in this blog, as permanent as the dotcom that lets me publish it for free.

Catch you on the flip side...

The little village of Kizu where I (and exactly 423 other gaijin)'ve been living may not have much nightlife or even a 24-hour konbini, but apparently it does have its own space-time...

When one of your colleagues in the government, say a foreign minister negotiating with North Korea, gets a bomb threat, what would be the responsible thing for the governor of Tokyo to say? "He deserved it," of course! At least the US government isn't the only one with hardline wackos in power.

Presentation: done. Work: still going. Just tomorrow left... Big suitcase: takkyubin'd.

As if to give me the finger for walking out on it after our six-month relationship, Japan slapped me with a $70 phone bill for the past three months. For a phone I don't even use. Grr...

As I was walking home from work this group of kids sitting around saw me started murmuring in hushed tones: "Amerika-jin! Amerika-jin!" (An American! An American!), as if I were the Loch Ness Monster or something. So, as I walked by I couldn't help myself: "Ee, amerika-jin desu yo." (Yeah, I am an American! [Punk!]). They were in awe. Ahh... I'm going to miss that dual citizenship--being both a god and a demon foreigner. Ah well.

Things I?fm Not Going To Miss:

• Kyoto City (the Japanese pronounce it shitty) Bus. Even the Marguerite is better than this.
  
• Irasshaimase! (Welcome!). Try screaming it in a really loud obnoxious high-pitched voice and multiply it by the number of people who work in a typical store and you?fll see why.
  
• Tenacious old Japanese ladies. Woe be to the unsuspecting lad, twice their size though he may be, who?fs standing in their way.
  
• Whiny little Japanese gyaru. There is such a thing as too cute.
  
• Humidity. It?fs be nice to go all day without being covered in sweat.
  

If there's a good reason for this, I'd love to know what it is:

No, this bill didn't get bleached or ride up Mt. Fuji with me in a rainstorm. It's actually turning...peach?!

It was 100-yen ($.85) night at the grocery store last night. I was gonna go crazy, but... I'm moving out in three days. Nevertheless, my dinner did cost me only Y200, plus 100 each for a quart of acerola juice (quite possibly the most random thing to be on sale) and...shoe cream. mmm, shoe cream...

Somehow I managed to get a cankersore on my tongue. How is a mystery to me, although it might have something to do with the cheapest Japanese toothpaste I could find. It really sucks, much more than ordinary ones. I've been slurring my speech all week. And I have to talk for an hour on Thursday. Any ideas for magic remedies? I've tried Listerine and salt water, but I'm holding off on cutting off my tongue because I think that might actually hurt just a little bit more.

Top Things I'm Going To Miss:

• $.85 sushi, umbrellas, teacups, underwear? okay, maybe not underwear.
  
• Free tissues on every corner!
  
• Trains. That actually run on time, are faster than cars, and run on the weekends.
  
• Karaoke. Yes, I know you can do it in the US. But not at the United States of Karaoke. Or any of the other dozen or so karaoke places that dot a city like Kyoto. Does Palo Alto have karaoke? If it did, it would close at 9. How could you do all-night karaoke? And where else can you sing Fantamu obu za Opera in Japanese?
  
• The microcosm of dirty salarymen openly reading porn, gaijin toting their travel guides, women in kimono, girl twins in matching outfits, and the random asleep guy falling on the shoulders of his neighbors, all on the same train.
  
• Mos Burger! Mmm? one of the few Japanese chains to get hamburgers right.
  Starbucks. I don't know what I'm going to do in a city without these places on every other corner--oh, wait. Oops.
  
• My keitai! I could get one just as cool in the US I suppose, but I'd have to pay for it. And paying to receive someone else's phone call (or e-mail) just doesn't seem right...
  
• KFC (or just Kantakki here) These really are rarer in the US.
  
• Engrish. I've almost gotten used to it here. But still.
  
• Qoo. That sweet, sugary drink, more syrupy even than Hi-C?
  
• Impressing the hell out of people by uttering two words in their native tongue. I know I'm white, but really now...
  

I just got back from my last dinner with my host family. My host mother didn't mince words: "wow, your Japanese has gotten worse!" So, inspired by Mike's blog (OK, so I ripped the idea off him completely), here are some of my biggest and best Japanese blunders:

• Do you have something to put on your hand when you hold something that's too hot?
  
• On my work: There are these big animals that want to eat little animals but the little animals are too fast. So by themselves they can't do it. But together they can. But in a computer?. Just like in The Matrix, those agents--they can think, they can learn. But they're programs. I'm making these animal programs. It's hard to explain in Japanese.
  
• Agent: Do you have a [Japanese] student ID?
  Me: I'm sorry, I can't speak Japanese.
  Agent: Is there a problem?
  Me: I'm sorry. I'm going to get a friend who can speak Japanese to call you back in a few minutes.
  
• Which sake has small rice added to it?
  
• Me: Where is the alcohol?
  Clerk: Beer?
  Me: No, Japanese alcohol. Alcohol.
  
• Tomomi: My English is terrible.
  Me: No, it�fs really good. You�fve only been studying a few years but still you haven�ft quite gotten good at English yet.
  Tomomi: Oh.
  
• KFC Clerk: Is eating here all right? [instead of take-out]
  Me: Qoo, please.
  KFC: Excuse me?
  Me: As for a drink, I�fd like a Qoo, please.
  KFC: Yes, one Qoo. Will you be eating here?
  

Today I realized a month-long dream: I had breakfast at Mister Donut (oddly enough, a Japanese chain even though it claims to be from Boston and SF Chinatown). Mmm...donuts...

I could have gone to Lawson, but I'll never look at that place the same way. Ari pointed out this group of Japanese guys that hangs out there every single night. Proof that there's not that much to do near my station at night...

But the weekend wasn't all pain and near-death experiences... we started off on an overnight bus to Tokyo. The idea behind the overnight bus is that you can sleep on it; you get on at 10 in Kyoto, and wake up at 6 in Tokyo. So why does the freakin' bus stop every two hours? Do you really need a rest stop if you're asleep? Of course, since I woke up each time they turned on the lights and stopped the bus I actually got off once, but still...

When we finally woke up after not much sleep and headed for the Tsukiji Fish Market. The novelty lasted about ten minutes. We saw some biig fish and almost got run over by carts. But we had some awesome maguro don (tuna with rice) with the freshest tuna I've ever had... (mmm... tuna)... for breakfast.

Eventually we made our way to a samba festival. Which was...amusing. Tons of people showed up for this thing, as if there were nothing better to do in Tokyo. The cops were out in full force doing crowd control, which is how we ended up standing on a crosswalk packed in with a bunch of Japanese people, including an old lady who spent the hour virtually straddling Crystal.

The parade consisted of a few kids' marching bands (yawn), some half-naked dancers dancing nothing that even remotely resembled salsa, and...pirates? Volleyball players? Judo students? So it was that, unimpressed, we conga-lined out of there. (Seriously, it got people to get out of our way...)

Courtesy of Karen... Proof that climbing Fuji could have been harder...

I always new it was a sick, sadistic mind that came up with Lisp...
malevole - Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer?

I never thought I'd say this about a romantic comedy, but I actually want to see this movie. Maybe it's because it's Bill Murray. Or maybe because it's about my life--a gaijin in Japan, minus the romance. They even filmed part of this in Kyoto--a nice departure from a Hollywood where modern Japan consists of just Tokyo and Okinawa...

A wise man climbs Fuji-san once, a fool attempts the climb twice.
--Japanese proverb

Those ancient Japanese were onto something. We'd all heard the sunrise view from the top of Fuji was a once-in-a-lifetime awesome experience. And maybe it is. I wouldn't know. But we were lured by this nonetheless, and so Saturday night around 8 we arrived at the 5th station (about 2000 m up), all pumped and ready to climb. "We" were a handful of SCTI people, plus a whole bunch of UC people Rajiv knew and a couple Keio students we knew, whom we would all bond with a lot that night.

After paying $.50 to use the bathrooms, cleaning out all the shops of their food, and eating some really awful udon, we got ready to set off. The first warning sign was that two of the women--someone whose name starts with K and someone with Pooh obsession--didn't bring warm clothes. (One thought she could hike all night on Fuji in a short-sleeve T-shirt.) We managed to find enough extra shirts and stuff for them and started off. The weather wasn't too bad, although the wind started picking up and blowing dirt in our faces. By the time we reached the eighth station around 1 AM, it had begun misting and we started hearing reports that it was getting dangerous to go further. By then our group had splintered into a few groups.

The baka: (stupid) Jonathan, Rajiv, and some guy from UC went all the way up to the summit. By the time we got there they were already at the ninth station, and Rajiv called to tell us (yes, cell phones even work on the top of Mt. Fuji... gotta love Japan...) it wasn't that hard to keep going. We were tempted to believe him but the wind was picking up and the innkeeper at the 8th station was telling us visibility was near zero. But they went up anyway, and as you can see in Jonathan's blog, they nearly died trying.

We decided that we didn't really want to risk it, and seeing it getting cloudier (and now pitch black on the trail) we figured we wouldn't be able to see the sunrise from any higher up anyway. The innkeeper wanted $50 to let us spend the few hours left till sunrise inside, which most of us balked at. So we took shelter against the wall outside, cuddling together for shared body heat. Amazing how in survival situations like this all inhibitions disappear and people you just met are now lying on top of you to keep warm.

As the hours went by, a second group, the okanemochi (rich), decided to plunk down the money for the slightly warmer (but definitely drier) inn. Eventually, Audrey, Crystal, Jeff Yao, and the Keio people caved.

The bimbo: (poor) The rest of us were hunkering down both against the strengthening storm and the evil innkeeper. He came out to yell at us for blocking a part of his entrance, as if we were keeping a flood of people from getting in. After his rant about how this was private property (in curiously good, but obviously rehearsed English), we moved down the wall and further into the direct wind. Now it was starting to rain and we were getting wet. Before long the inn filled up and the demon innkeeper started turning people away.

Eventually we spied this big tarp lying around that no one was using. So being the enterprising engineers we were, we made ourselves a little makeshift tent. And it was nice and dry--and warm. We were just mastering the art of keeping it against the wind and thinking this wouldn't be that bad a way to spend the night when a strong force started tugging at the tarp. We fought against it but next thing we knew we were looking at the innkeeper, grinning ear to ear as he tore our shelter away. He then proceeded to spend the next 15 minutes trying to fold it up in the gale-force winds. The man came out of his packed little inn into this powerful storm just to torment a few gaijin who couldn't pay for a night's stay even if they wanted to.

The rain was getting harder, and a couple of the women were now shivering uncontrollably. So we decided to head back down the mountain. Which was not easy since it was a) night, b) windy, and c) wet and slippery. We passed a number of people who told us we were crazy. And we didn't all have working flashlights by that point. But in a testament to just how much we'd bonded over the past few hours huddling against the wind, some real teamwork emerged as we shared the light and helped each other down. At each stop along the way we checked for the prospect of shelter. But each time we were turned away, and even shushed so the guests inside could sleep.

Around 4, in front of one of the seventh-station inns, Christine was on the brink of hypothermia. So she and Tim spent the night there (fortunately this inn was the first we reached willing to take in a freezing girl) and the rest of us continued. About half an hour later we came across another inn whose owner was still up and on inquiry offered us $4 cocoa. A small price to get out of the rain, we reasoned, so we stayed there until the sunrise, if you could call it that. But despite the fact that he could plainly see we were soaking wet (we all stripped off our outer two or three layers as soon as we walked in) he left the window open and later threw the door wide open, in a not-so-subtle attempt to get us to leave. But he was mostly absorbed with radioing weather observations about the storm (observations that might have been useful had we be informed of them on the way up) so he didn't seem to care.

The sunrise was pretty bimio (not-so-good), but the sky did become brighter--it went from black to gray. Not really feeling that much warmer, we resolved to keep moving, emboldened by visibility. We made it to the bottom by 7, as the winds became brutal. The warm "rest house" felt soo good after all that. Vince and the UC people bailed on the first bus out, along with a mass exodus of people who were finding the winds too strong to climb up. By noon no one was trying to go up anymore. So Karen and I waited to hear from everyone else. It didn't help that the cell phones, which worked perfectly on top of the mountain, here worked only outside at this one point where the winds seemed to attack you from all sides. I kept venturing out trying in vain to contact people, staying outside as long as I could bear.

By chance I saw Audrey on one of these trips, who had left the okanemochi to try and find the baka, only to find the winds which were bad enough down here making it really unsafe to go to the summit. A few hours later, again by chance outside, I ran into Jonathan, who was so happy to be alive he promptly fell asleep at our refugee center upstairs. Eventually everyone else made it down, and Christine seemed healthy if a bit tired. Really it is nothing short of a miracle that we all made it down alive.

Were this an American national park, we certainly would have heard about life-threatening conditions like these somewhere along the way. But no. For a national icon and frequently climbed attraction, there's nothing hospitable or tourist-friendly about this mountain. Shop and inn owners extort as much money as they can out of people and don't really give a toot about the ones not paying, be they freezing or not. The restaurants all sucked, and there was not a trash can anywhere at any of the stations we stopped at. The information desk and every other store clerk feigned ignorance about the buses, telling us to go stand in the massive line for simple questions about the schedule, as if it changed every day.

We all solemnly (with varying degrees of cursing) vowed never to return to that mountain. In the end we got a few nice views...at the bottom of our climb. That's right--we could have hiked half an hour up, stayed there, and seen more than the people who went to the summit. Y'arrrgh...

Quick Fuji update: All the SCTI people safely made it down Fuji, somehow. It brought some people to the brink of hypothermia or death, but we all made it, including Christine. Since I for some reason went to work today, I'm dead tired and so at 9:30, too tired to write lucidly, I'm going to bed. So tune in tomorrow for the full account, "Fuji: the Baka, the Bimbo, and the Bimio."

Ohh, so tired... Why didn't we climb Mt. Fuji like this?

Ahh... once again I'm waiting for results so I can justify blogging. I suppose a description of my typical day at home in the lonely land of almost-Nara is in order, given that I'm leaving in two weeks.
7:45. Alarm goes off.
8:15. I actually get up.
~8:56. I go for a brisk morning jog to the bus. Sometimes, for even more exercise, I jog all the way to the next bus stop. I love jogging.
9:15. I get to work. Whether I ran to the bus or not, I'm covered in sweat by now. I love humidity.
12:00. Lunch. Usually in the dull cafeteria here, but occasionally fine dining with Mike down the street or my boss in Nara.
5:45 PM. My work day officially ends so I walk over to say good night to my boss. But he starts a conversation I can't get out of, until...
5:55. I miss the bus back. When I'm done chatting with the boss I come back and surf until the next bus.
~6:20. I get home, survey the fridge, and if I'm feeling particularly adventurous pick a recipe. (But with my discovery of frozen dinners I can usually avoid this.)
7:00. Having finally finished deciphering the kanji in my recipe I trek down to the supa to go wander around until I find everything, or a sympathetic-looking clerk who can show me where stuff is. (They'll never just tell me the way they will at Kroger. I know I'm just a gaijin, but really, I can handle things like, Aisle 5 on the right.) I love shopping in kanji...
8:00. The soothing chords of Auld Lang Syne (better known here as the Just Go Home Already song) start wafting through the store as it closes. By now I'm hopefully at home, starting to cook.
~8:30. Dinner, candlelight, and Naruto. Except without the candelight. (Or the Boyz II Men, eh Karen?)
~12:30. I fall asleep after some Simpsons.

Tell me, just why does this site exist?
Learn to use toilets

This is why I love Japanese TV.

Tonight I started the yearlong second big set of goodbyes in my life. Insert wistful thoughts about time, impermanence, suffering, cessation of suffering, and dharma here.

I got my first piece of personally addressed junk mail today! Unlike the standard fare of apartment offers and call-girl services, this had my name, handwritten (since their print templates probably can't deal with a massive name like mine). This is how I know I've been living here too long.

If other blogs have kanji of the day, Japanese words of the day, and even bio jargon of the day, I can be geeky too with my GRE Word of the Day: erudite ("learned, scholarly"). Whee...

So after the ladies changed into yukata, I rejoined them, clad in traditional T-shirt-and-shorts, to go to the Hirakata fireworks. Which were sweet, although they paled in comparison to PL of course. Afterward we wandered around the matsuri, where we saw people dancing the bon odori Okano-sensei taught us back in Japanese class. I never thought I'd actually see it in person... And we ate Doraemon- and Hello-Kitty-shaped castera. Mmmm...Doraemon...

Oh good, California's election was looking a little too credible:
Vote chalupa!

Sunday I went to the beach with Audrey and her host sister Aya, Audrey's coworker Emma, half of Northern Ireland who knows Emma, Karen, and these two male coworkers she brought from Okayama. I shall say no more about the two of them, except that they persuaded her to ditch us for both lunch and dinner that day... The beach was lots of fun, eventually leading to contests to see who could do the most acrobatic dives...

After the Okayama posse hurried back for dinner and we bid the Irish farewell, Audrey, Aya, and I went back to her homestay to meet up with a friend of theirs so they could change into yukata while I sat around making small talk with her host father, who came in and greeted me with, "So, is this a strip show?" What am I supposed to say, "Yes, I'm watching a strip show with your daughter in it"?

Things That Light Up
Evil QuickTime broke my photo clip maker. So you get spared the crappy background music...instead you can now browse an album of cool (and semi-cook) shots from the light-ups at Nara and Kyoto from two weekends ago. It's happier with Internet Explorer (yes, I know, that's annoying, but I'm too lazy to do anything about it right now).

Friday night most of Kansai met up at this great ramen place near Tim and Catherine's old place. I was an hour late, thanks to the city bus and the hordes of people getting off Kintetsu. (Usually there's more of a sense of urgency coming out of train stations--including the guys who always run in vain after the last train as if there will be a bus waiting for them, but this time it must have been Gawk at Kyoto-Eki Night because there were a ton of people taking their sweet time...) By the time I got to the bus stop the bus should have already left but of course, Kyoto city buses are so reliably late. (Insert my mamonaku ("shortly") rant here.)

Anyhoo, afterward we went bowling. Not just any drab American bowling, mind you. This place was pretty trippy: there were black lights, disco balls, and music videos playing on TVs as we got unlimited bowling for Y1000 ($9). After one or two games, we started finding ways to spice it up. Beer and bowling make for an interesting combination, shall we say. We finally had one of the alley clerks come tell us we couldn't do piggyback bowling, of course in very polite, apologetic Japanese. We would have gotten kicked out of an American alley so fast... Then Oliver decided every frame should be a bet involving the loser kissing someone. So Catherine and Karen ran and hid. Which is understandable: cooties are no laughing matter.

Need a place to stay after an exciting romp with the deer of Nara? Try...
ƒ]ƒ]‚Ì–¯�h: Zozo no Minshuku

18 tatami of more space than Zozo knows what to do with

Convenient location in the exciting town of Kizu--not quite Nara but pretty damn far from Kyoto

Just north of the Nara-ken border, so no pesky deer to stand around peacefully and ignore you

Prepare your tastebuds for an adventure with local specialties prepared by the resident master chef, like rice flamb'e, frozen gyoza, and microwaved shumai

Be astounded by the amazing musical microwave

Five channels of the best Nara TV entertainment you can get for free

Local pizza, sex services available by phone

Nearby grocery store open till 8 for your late-night shopping needs

Free shuttle bus to the world's largest sundial

I must say, despite the location, I really lucked out with this place. Check out my apartment with this 360-degree panorama. (You may need evil QuickTime if you don't already have it.)

Today's revelation: Burnt rice smells (and looks) a lot worse than it tastes, really.

Last night I went (electronics) shopping in Nara. My boss, it turned out, was also headed across the border, and claimed there was a Joshin (big electronics store) in the mal he was going to. Score--free car ride! I never realized just how much I miss riding in cars (not to mention driving...). We get there and it turns out the store in the mall is... a Jusco (grocery store). D'oh! At least he got some fish. We also checked a couple bookstores for this book of video game art (yes, such things do exist) Stephanie's looking for. No dice. But... we made it to a real Joshin with five minutes to spare and I scored a sweet tripod for $13...

When I got home I found among my junk mail two ads: one for a pizza place, and another for a call-girl service. I don't know what kinds of evenings they figure people in my apartment complex have... and I don't think I want to know...

Oh good... because I was just starting to forget the dog from the Aifuru commercials:


What more could this dog want? How about his own CD? Songs "set to 'relaxing' and 'exercising' themes, including one with 'the raw voice of Que-chan'"...

Today I kinda slept in, with my patented Falling Asleep After The Alarm technique. So after the second snooze at 8:15, I sat up in bed but didn't get up, and so I somehow managed to fall asleep sitting up. Next thing I know it's 8:40, and the bus leaves at 8:56. There's nothing quite like the impending fear of being late to get you going in the morning. Granted, 16 minutes is plenty of time to shower. Which makes me wonder why I don't get up at 8:40 every day...

After work today I went bowling with some coworkers. I've never seen a bowling alley so deserted (of course, it was Tuesday night in Nara). I got these nice stylish purple-and-fuschia bowling shoes (perfect example of the word hade). My average was...well, let's not go into that. But the lanes are so high-tech: cameras show the ball knocking down pins close up, a sensor measures the speed of the ball, and at the end you get a detailed printout of every pin you left standing. Not really something I need a reminder of, but still cool.

It's been a chill weekend. Oh no, I'm starting to sound like Oliver... Anyhoo:

Friday felt so much like a Friday. It was a slow day at work, mostly spent waiting for my legions of killer agents to finish, er, killing, so after lunch I was fielding text messages from three different people trying to get to Nara that night. Liz decided to come down on a few hours' notice, which she could do with her JR pass on shinkansen. Meanwhile, pass-less Karen got stranded on regular trains in a real rainstorm and needed to take a shinkansen to get here anyway. And Camille had her first Kintetsu experience, discovering the limited express the hard way. But I met up with them eventually (though not all at the same time) in Nara. The crowds at Todaiji were rabid but Nara's finest were keeping the crowds orderly (even creating an impressive traffic crossing between two streams of visitors). Then we stayed up till 4 watching the Animatrix.

Saturday we had grandiose visions of swimming at a beach, or even a lake. So we went to Lake Biwa. What a letdown. It was kinda gray so it wasn't that great for swimming anyway, but that didn't stop us from trying to break into a hotel swimming pool. We got worried when we saw the lifeguard coming, but he just told us to take a shower downstairs first. (Typical of Japan, actually. They like things clean and unchlorinated.) Thinking we had just fooled them all, we made it all the way into the locker rooms before little hotel ladies came out and asked for our passes. We would have had to pay $29 for the half an hour left before it closed...so no swimming after all.

That night we met up with Carter and one of Liz's friends for the Kyoto Daimonji festival. Essentially they light up big kanji or shapes in fire on the sides of the mountains surrounding the city. Of course we went up to Arashiyama, out in the middle of nowhere, because the Lonely Planet told us to. The kanji-on-the-mountain thing was kinda overrated. The lanterns in the lake were much cooler. After we'd finished gaping at both, we tried following the crowds back to the station but they all got in cars and left. Finally we asked a kind Kyoto couple out walking their dog for directions; they took us all the way to the station instead despite my repeated pleas not to go out of their way.

Once again, we were up till 4, this time watching Naruto.

Wow... I'm so glad I don't live in Detroit any more...

"Before you pick up a brick and throw it, before you tip over a car, before you take a TV, you better ask yourself, is this worth 10 years of my life?"
--Wayne County prosecutor trying to stifle Detroiters' insatiable urge to riot

Tuesday night I went to see the Nara raito-appu (I'm not kidding, that's what they call it) with a coworker. Being only Tuesday night, the crowds weren't that bad. The whole Nara Park (of deer fame) was covered in lanterns and random lit up structures, making for some beautiful scenes, especially on the ponds. The moon was out, but shrouded by clouds, giving me some nice freaky photos of the haunted festival gazebo. There was a small army of festival officals scurrying about relighting lanterns and replacing candles. If this were promoted like the fireworks shows I'd have some figure of how many lanterns there were. I don't know, how about...lots.

Tomorrow night Todaiji is opened up for the peak of the festival, where there'll be even more lanterns inside and a special room opened for one of two days of the year. So I plan to go back, along with every other warm-blooded Kansaijin.

My GRE book arrived from amazon.co.jp today. I was so impressed. Shipping is so efficient here. Two days after ordering I found a little delivery notice in my mailbox asking me to reschedule delivery. (I never get anything from Amazon in two days...) This morning we called to reschedule and they delivered it this afternoon...to the office. Try getting UPS to do that. But now that it's here, I have something else to do at home besides surf, download anime, and watch anime...

Whoa.

I spent the weekend in Okayama visiting Karen and Ben with Tim, Audrey, and Audrey's coworker Emma. Saturday consisted of traveling down there just in time to go shopping in the classy covered arcade. This one had a Virgin record store with a whole wall of "Dance and Black Music". I don't know how they get away with that level of un-PCness (nay, racism) here, other than the lack of customers that speak English or are black. Then we walked Okayama's officially designated Romantic Walk, which starts with the charming post office and runs a full block to a fairy-tale FamilyMart. There are, of course, lots of color-changing neon signs to inform you that this is, in fact, the Romantic Walk.

After a great dinner at a little Korean place we introduced Emma to the bread-and-butter of Japanese nightlife, karaoke. At...the United States of Karaoke? Apparently it's this place where every room is a different theme, say like the all-American Little Tokyo, Chinatown, or Canadian Rocky rooms. My favorite was the Detroit room, so distinguished by its dirty look and steering wheel mounted in the wall. We ended up in what the clerk informed me was the Santa Fe room. Alas the United States of Karaoke only had a United Kingdom's worth of English-language music, but this was made up for by the biggest stock I've seen of Japanese-language American musicals. Now Fantamu obu za Opera ranks as my favorite translation. And for the first time in karaoke I found I Got Rhythm--in Japanese no less! Ah, that brings back memories...

And so in one night we saw the entirety of Okayama's downtown. The next day we saw a garden that ranks as one of Japan's top three (very nice, although what the heck's a rice paddy doing in the middle of it?) and returned to Kurashiki for the novelty of shopping in really old-looking buildings.

If you actually thought porn star Mary Carey's was going to run a serious campaign on anything remotely related to California's problems, think again.

And in other disturbing recall news, the man who may well be California's next governor didn't make the choice lightly:

"It was the most difficult decision that I made in my entire life, except the one in 1978 when I decided to get a bikini wax."

More than I ever wanted to know about Arnold...

A typhoon came through Japan on Friday. It caused mudslides in Okayama, flooding in Mie, and killed several people with its strong winds.

It was weak sauce in Kyoto. An unequivocal letdown.

The buildup was great. The news Thursday night was talking about 150 km/h winds and forecasting over 30 cm (12") of rain for the Kansai area. We were evacuated from work at 1 PM Friday, ten hours before the typhoon actually arrived, because there were fears trains would be canceled. (Which did happen eventually.) So I went to Kyoto. While I was wandering around waiting for other people to get off work, the wind did kick up a little, and killed my umbrella (no, not a 100-yen/$.85 one; this one cost me Y300...) A little rain started blowing in, which was only an issue on the very edges of the covered arcade.

I met up with the remaining Kansaites who weren't hiding from the (impending) rain. (This excluded Catherine, whose parents got a hold of her home phone and started calling her every hour to make sure she wasn't going outside, and Camille, who jankily decided not to tell us she was having dinner with her host family.) By 9 the streets were deserted, as if word got out that Godzilla was headed to downtown Kyoto. So this left the five of us guys walking around Kiyamachi... it projected the wrong image apparently. Strip club owners desperate for business came out and offered us a "typhoon discount", telling us, "Gaijin are OK too".

We were out till past midnight, and barely any rain fell. The wind was very unimpressive. Only after we got back to Tim's apartment did the typhoon arrive in force, with some stronger winds and rain. Others reported the wind waking them up; I slept through Tim snoring so I was oblivious to it. In the morning the Kamo river looked a little swelled and we saw a (single) tree branch on the ground. Not quite like a hurricane, or even a Midwest thunderstorm...

By far the best Mac ad I've seen in a long time:
http://www.stanford.edu/~zozo/clips/macssuck.wmv

The California recall election is heating up. If you're fed up with Governor Davis, you have your choice from any number of qualified candidates, like:

Arnold Schwarzenegger. Movie actor. Pro: No one's better prepared for the imminent rise of the machines. Con: No one can spell his name either.

Larry Flynt. Porn publisher. (Actual quote: "I don't think anyone here will have a problem with a smut peddler as governor.") Pro: An outspoken proponent of...free speech. Proposed a national holiday to pray for the death of rabid Fox News host Bill O'Reilly. Con: Plans to balance the budget with more slot machines. Why? He coincidentally owns a bunch of casinos.

Mary Carey. Porn star. Pro: Might take votes away from Larry. Con: Campaign slogan? "We've had Brown, we've tried Gray, now it's time for some blonde."

And there are about 200 other candidates. Can you get 65 friends' signatures and $3500? You too could run for governor.

Once again I'm reminded of why I don't read American news here.

Sunday I went to see the 48 Waterfalls of Akame with my boss from work. You'd think that'd be really awkward, but he's a chill guy who, unlike most CS geeks, actually enjoys the outdoors. He's also an aspiring amateur photographer, so he brought his camera. He took so many pictures of me in front of waterfalls it was starting to creep me out. But a few of them, like this one, turned out really well, and he brought me prints and a little CD on Monday. As for the falls, they were beautiful, although swarming with tourists. As my boss said, "The only complaint people have about the 48 Falls of Akame is that there aren't really 48 waterfalls." I didn't count (okay, okay, I lost count), but I don't think I saw 48. Heck, this picture's probably #19, #20 and #21...

Wednesday night I went to a jazz club in Kyoto with Tim, Audrey, and (my language partner) Ritsuko. It was my first jazz club... and definitely my first one in Japan. The music was great: Hiro from Kyoto University and a frequent visitor at the Stanford Center was playing with his band, which was quite good. On the drums was this guy from California who came over and chatted with us about his 3-year stint in Japan.

Afterwards Ritsuko and I had to catch an early train so we could transfer to our little backwaters stops. As we were running along Sanjo I guess this cluster of Japanese girls caught on to the impending last train to anywhere-besides-Osaka because when they saw us they started running too. It was amusing: Japanese people seem to be quite used to running to trains. When I got off at Tambabashi, everyone else making the transfer ran to the other side of the station even though we had like seven minutes to transfer. It's very unnerving to be walking towards a train while everyone else around you is running. It makes you wonder if they know something you don't. Then again, I've also seen Japanese women running out of stations late at night, long after the last bus has left. Maybe it's ingrained habit, or maybe they're just afraid of the gaijin man.

On Saturday Jonathan and I got to taiko class early. So early in fact we were the only ones there. Yes, we kinda forgot that there was no class that weekend. So, after some wandering around and vegetating in his air-conditioned apartment, we set off for Kinkakuji (not to be confused with Ginkakuji, which sounds almost exactly the same) with Tim.

It really is striking: it's called the Golden Pavilion for good reason. Some shogun apparently had nothing better to do with his money than to build himself a gold-plated retirement house. Eventually it was turned into a temple. And in the sunlight, which we had plenty of that day, it's really nice.

Afterward, we decided to go see Pirates of Caribbean (its Japanese title lacks the word the for some reason) with Catherine, subtitled of course. The most violence in a Disney film since Bambi died. But we all enjoyed it. Orlando Bloom actually looked like a man this time, which is always good. (Catherine seemed prepared to defend him to the death, but she doesn't read this blog now does she?)

One more step towards the Matrix. And of course, it's being taken right here in Japan. Actually, not far from Kyoto:
Power from blood could lead to 'human batteries'

Theoretically, it could allow a person to pump out 100 watts - enough to illuminate a light bulb. But that would entail converting all the food eaten by the individual into electricity. In practice, less power would be generated since food is needed by the body.

Good to see we're still allowing for practical concerns, like, say, living...

So it turns out that a couple of photo clips I thought were posted vanished from Leland, maybe out of protest for me using up my quota. But they (Shibuya and Shinjuku, Tokyo) are back now, along with (very) amateur video from the PL Fireworks, for your viewing pleasure.

It's been a fun but exhausting weekend. Friday I headed out to this small town near Osaka for the largest fireworks show in the world, put on by the Church of Perfect Liberty. Exactly what kind of church can afford to shoot off 120,000 fireworks I don't know, but it was spectacular. ("Showering like Niagara Falls," according to one Website.) I was planning to meet up with Jonathan, Tim, and Other Mike, but about a quarter-million Japanese people had other plans. So when I arrived at this tiny station (after transferring thrice to increasingly crowded trains, finally having a conductor turn me away from one that was too packed with people), clearly not built to handle a crowd, I started trying to call people but found a quarter million people trying to use the same cell tower. The only time my keitai ever let me down. That, and the other mob event I went to, Gion Matsuri.

But the fireworks were freaking awesome, easily topping any measly national celebrations in America. These girls behind me seemed to think so too; after nearly each of the 120,000 bursts, they cooed, "Ahh! Kirei! (Beautiful!)". They weren't ready for the finale though--they started screeching as if the fireworks were raining down on them...

But imagine the odds, I ended up finding them all after the crowd began to disperse. Getting out of there was like waiting for a ride at Cedar Point (or Disneyland for anyone not from the Midwest).

There were too many people crowded around for me to get decent shots with my camera, so I resolved to take video instead. The results are up for your viewing pleasure, and although at times it looks more like CNN footage of Baghdad, it looks pretty impressive. And that's only from the first 15 minutes--before I ran out of space on my card...