such a weekend

It's been an great weekend. It's been a grueling weekend. I probably won't sleep tonight. But there's been plenty of highlights.

I started off by inspecting the asphalt in front of Roble Thursday morning. Lesson learned: However bad bike traction is on wet pavement, it's worse on wet grass. A piece of advice: if someone on a bike comes barreling toward you, let them pass. Don't force them off the path.

Lest my mother start panicking, I can assure you that I am fine, a few scrapes aside. The pain in my underarm-turn shoulder was really distressing the day before Viennese. But the doctor assured me that, after some ibuprofen, I wouldn't notice. And, hey, I am typing with that hand now...

I started off Friday interviewing for a research internship in the CS department. This prof is doing really cool work on using AI to build an intelligent office assistant, which sounds amazingly like the senior project I wanted to do. One major area they're working on is building a smarter e-mail client that can detect spam better than existing filters (this guy hammered the Bayesian filter I've been using for the past year as "something some guy wrote in one night", so I'm curious to see what he's got in mind), and automatically file and organize e-mail for you instead of making you set up lots of manual filters. Some of the work's even being contributed to the Mozilla browser and Thunderbird e-mail projects. Geeky cool fun.

Having received official doctor's orders to dance the night away, we made our way down to Burlingame for a lovely Benihana dinner and a full night of (mostly) blissful dancing at Viennese. It was so much fun. From the wonderful performances to the pleasure of remembering half the Congress of Vienna, it was a great time. It was crowded, but we still got in a few great dances. I even randomly ran into a girl I met in Osaka there...(Sayaka, for those Kansai folk out there.) We had a waltz where she was reduced to her one week's waltz experience and I was reduced to the little Japanese I remembered, togther chanting Ich, ni, san, Ni, ni san to the beat. I also had some wonderful waltzes and polkas with Yune and Laura, who, despite all their claims to the contrary, are really improving a lot for their first month of waltz... Sadly, it may be the last Ball. Pictures are coming, whenever it is I make it back to my desktop.

Since then it's been payback time. I spent all Saturday catching up on lectures and a problem set. On a most excellent note, though, I got the internship! It doesn't pay much at all, but it's a great opportunity to get into Stanford research, and I'm enough of a geek to think it's really cool... So I'll finally have a summer on campus after all... now that many of my friends are finally moving off-campus...

Today's lesson: Never try to bike with a hot beverage. A corollary: Never try to drink a hot beverage while biking.

idle chatter

Funny, it seems like just last week. We were sitting around a dinner table idly chatting in a desperate attempt to avoid doing work, much as most every dinner ends. Really, it only takes 20 minutes to eat, particularly on a bad food night. (Our current theory is that Ricker moves in cycles, being best on Sunday nights and degrading till they just throw whatever they have left out on Thursday.) But it's also a time of denial--when people will start reading the newspaper (!), doing the crosswords, or chatting about anything, anything to avoid returning to their rooms to do work. Dinner can take over an hour like this.

There are always a few solid staples for conversation:

1. CS. Lots of CS majors around, and they love to gripe about the massive program they have to write for CS 2xx or the problem set that won't die. As a CS major, I'm qualified to say we think we have a monopoly on impossible workloads.
   
2. Bio. There are almost as many bio majors, and when the talk gets technical, they bust out their deoxyribonucleohomeostatic words. It makes them feel special too. A certain couple people invariably end up discussing dissecting ants.
   
3. Politics. Most of us are way too apathetic to actually do anything about our government, but we love to whine. And, of course, politicians have given us plenty to whine about lately. Granted, Stanford is a pretty liberal group, even for California. But the lone conservatives are fun to mess with, and make these conversations even better.

So it was one day when talk turned to the latest craze in San Francisco. Apparently our governor takes this as seriously as evil terminators from the future, because he compares it to assault weapons and drugs. Just for hypothetical fun I asked, "So how long will it take for Bush to throw his weight behind a constitutional amendment?"

Little did I know that's exactly what he did. I must say I wasn't really all that surprised. Once again, conservatives want to amend the Constitution to take away personal freedoms for the first time since Prohibition. If you've got a few seconds for some armchair activism,
sign the PFAW petition against this movement.

now hiring

Software Engineer
Designs, modifies, develops, writes and implements software programming applications. Requires a bachelor's degree in a related area and 0-2 years of experience in the field or in a related area. Primary job functions do not typically require exercising independent judgment. Typically reports to a manager.
--Salary.com: What can you look forward to?

Ah yes, good to know most software engineering jobs are simply mindless and require no independent thought...

Speaking of which, having half your senior project group downstairs is somewhat of a mixed blessing...

hasn't this guy done enough damage already?

Really now...

Whatever you do, don't dry your hair

Apparently blow-drying your hair or using an electric shaver can cause brain damage. So now if you value your brain (and are paranoid), you can't use cell phones, shavers, driers, ovens, clocks, or walk anywhere near power lines. Exciting

From Christine's blog: I don't know why I was so amused by this. Perhaps it has something to do with all the media attention this group's been getting. Or perhaps you could make some elaborate IHum-like statement with the word juxtaposition in it. Certain readers are sure to enjoy it I think.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarghhh...

Why oh why is it so hard to solve this simple problem?

Six people want to have a nice dinner before Viennese. Three of them are vehemently opposed to seafood, two of them love seafood. Three of them are apprehensive about Italian food. Two of them are threatening to splinter off from the group with their dates.

So if you know of any good local restaurants that a) serve more than just seafood, b) have "normal"-sounding things on their menus, c) six people in tuxes and gowns wouldn't look out-of-place in, and d) serves dinner for <$20 a person, let me know...

I guess life is just one big constraint satisfaction problem...

On a much less frustrated note: I got into the coterm! Soon I shall be a (hopefully not-too-)sketchy grad student... Now all I have to do is figure out how to pay for it and find some way to make money this summer--that is, in my spare time of course...

before there was Whoopie...

I found this greatly amusing. Not at all like any incarnation of Hollywood Squares I've seen in my lifetime. Could it be that celebrities of today are simply less witty than those of yesteryear?

Vindication at alast...

Yahoo! News - A full night's sleep? Not everyone needs it

A vexing 48 hours

At long last, the surely much awaited culmination of my latest project, which involved a 24-hour Flash marathon and one all-nighter: Screw science. The real reason we're going to Mars is plain American baseball...

After finishing this I did sleep like the dead for eight hours. Having been 9:30 when I went to bed (sad, I know), I got up before the sun and spent the following six hours cramming for the 75-minute midterm that still ended up reaming me. This was the first exam here where I actually left questions blank. It felt really bad. All this despite the TA's claim that the midterm questions would all be "easier than the homework". Between this class and CS 242 last quarter I'm starting to develop a very cynical distrust of most everything TAs say.

Also this morning, I had the shortest job interview ever. (Given how little time I had to prepare for the midterm, I was uber-grateful, but still.) This guy from Oracle had e-mailed me a week ago offering a phone interview specifically today. I e-mailed him back and pled for another day (like tomorrow, when I have no class), but no dice. The recruiter called my room last Tuesday, while I was frantically finishing a problem set, and I made the mistake of answering my landline, blowing my cover story that I'm not around Tuesdays. The guy forced me to admit that yes, I am technically in my room for an hour-long window on Tuesdays and told me to be there.

To be continued...

some progress!

An update on the ongoing campaign: if you search Google for "safety school" Weenies you get some interesting results... Got a Website? Or a blog? Join us now and see if we can make the Weenies more famous. Even better if you can add it or safety school to your blog template...

While you're at it, feel free to add this one as well: zesty.

:?

I love California. It was raining ridiculously hard when I got up, but the sun was shining brightly by the afternoon. Yes, it feels like February. Speaking of which, I just realized that, for the first time in eight years, February will have 29 days! Exciting I know.

Speaking of excitement, my latest Flash opus is now finished: a little Flash quiz. Original, I know. But not just any quiz. Now available for general mockery, The Great Emoticon Quiz! You know you've always wondered just what ''8 sounds like...