Wednesday, January 14

week in review

Week the first has already passed. A lot has happened in the sleepy first week. Classes began. An IMAX movie seen. Palo Alto frequented. So now, in a quick summary, the joys and gripes of the past week:

Joys
  1. I have a date to Viennese! She's lamenting the arduous process of dress shopping right now. At the risk of parodying Flower Drum Song, I enjoy being a guy...
  2. More dance than you can shake a stick at. A most excellent Jammix, half emptied by ski trips that weekend, made for some great dancing, including a wonderful waltz to Erin Shore at the end (the MIDI truly doesn't do it justice...) Plus possibly a stint with Los Decanos, if my schedule works out.
  3. The Palo Alto Borders, which is far cooler than its Novi counterpart and even The Original one in Ann Arbor. And having time to browse...
  4. That new crepe place on University: it's been a while since I've had Asian style crepes and these are, well, almost as good...


Annoyances and Gripes
  1. Flash. For all the nifty things this program does (including such wonderful opi as Stick Figure Fight), whoever designed the interface should be shot. I swear there's a conspiracy afoot to keep Flash a hard-to-acquire skill and thus artificially inflate Web designers' salaries...
  2. The grad admissions department, which last week "wasn't sure" if they had one of my recommendations or not, and only Monday admitted that they couldn't find it. I trust my advisor more than I trust these people, but since he's at Oxford right now, I'm up the proverbial creek. Fortunately another prof took pity on me to write another letter on three days' notice.
  3. Forms designed by masochists who think it's sooo cool that everything fits on one page. Asking people to write anything legibly in half the space of college ruled paper is like asking Bob Sapp to squeeze into a Japanese elevator with you--it can be done, but it'll be painful.
  4. The friendly folks at Chase Visa, who've assumed that since I wasn't here over break to receive the papers contesting mysterious charges placed on my account by Japanese firms that I no longer cared to contest them. This fight may stretch on, but I'm shopping for another Visa card.

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