to the tune of: Away From the Sun by 3 Doors Down
...for I have now a Gates key. (Cue choir of angels.) Yes, a scant week after starting work in the AI lab I now not only have a desk and computer but a key so I can get back in after lunching on the AT&T Terrace. (For those who've never been to Gates, everything is named after a company. Bill didn't give us that much...) But yes, I now have one of those nifty "intelli-keys" that were high tech ten years ago but look like they could be cell phones now. I spent ten minutes just going around to all the entrances and putting in my key. It was a watershed moment, hearing that beep that says, "You are special enough to be granted access". So now I can go to Gates whenever I want. I don't know whether this is a good thing per se... My ex-girlfriend maintained that the more keys you have, the more important you were, but Dr. Touster countered, "It seems like if you're important enough, you can always get someone to let you in. 'Jeeves, open the door for me.'"
Luckily three of my teammates had Gates keys for the SRC campus Game Saturday night. Actually, had they not had keys we would just have walked around to the other side. We ended up visiting Gates often for its 24-hour cluster to decipher Game clues, including at its most ludicrous a list of butterfly species and an excerpt from one of Nabokov's books. Apparently, we were meant to look up each of these species to see which was named for or by Nabokov, then generate letters using a cipher from the passage, then unscramble them to find we were just supposed to go to the butterfly greenhouse. We made the mistake of trying to figure this out on our own and it cost us. But it was fun up until then... and even afterward when we were too tired to care. I maintain Games should not have a guessing penalty...
Our first official barbeque at the Zone was a resounding success. We proved our dominion over fire. There's something satisfying about watching flames you created for some reason... And we fashioned an ad hoc karaoke machine by hooking my computer up to the TV and playing MP3s while Googling the lyrics...
Today's philosophical question: why is it women get so much more worked up about toilet seat position than men? It is just as much work and equally icky (but still trivial) to raise a toilet seat as to lower it, so why should men be expected to leave the seat down all the time? Particularly on a toilet whose primary users are men, it seems more efficient to leave the seat up. I've never heard men actually complain about this, mind you, only women. It seems like today's empowered women should be capable of expending the half-second effort to adjust the toilet seat as needed. My challenge to female readers: leave a good reason why not. (Or agree, that works too.)
I still haven't managed to get music playing on my work computer thanks to Linux sound card weirdness so I brought an MP3 CD to jam to as I code. I need music to code by, else I go mad listening to the robots' fans and laser scanners running constantly. I decided to try listening to it as I biked back, which was kinda sublime. I suppose this is what owning an iPod would be like. It was all I could do to avoid belting out Beautiful Day as I was rolling down Escondido in the sunshine. But I think I prefer the natural soundtrack of birds, fountains, and cars.
So it's come to this: Direct pleas for soap in our bathrooms. Once again, I'm glad we're going to have our own bathroom in the Rains Work-Free Zone. Two of them, in fact.
Speaking of which, I promised this a while ago, and here it is: Me in makeup for Los Decanos 
