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.