surpri-er, whatever

to the tune of: Night and Day by The Real Group

It was doomed from the start. From before it began, some would say. But alas, despite the best efforts we could muster, we just had really bad luck surprising Dave for his birthday. Ingredients for poor planning: uncertainty about where we were going to be living come the weekend, a CURIS poster session keeping us at Gates till late hours, and RCC training keeping me away from the phone and AIM most of the day.

The plan in the end was simple. Dave's friends would head to Fu Lam Man on the Castro (Kat's suggestion) and wait for us there. Aria, Ben, and I would take Dave out to dinner. We'd just happen to pick the same restaurant. Hilarity would ensue.

People were late in showing up so we gathered them at Willis Lounge. I went out to "get the mail" and usher them off to their cars in the parking lot. What I didn't know was that Aria had brought Dave outside, where he could plainly see a crowd of people behind me sneaking off to the side of the building. This was warning sign number 1.

As we headed off to Mountain View, my cell phone, which normally rings once or twice a day, was going off every few minutes. Apparently this place was not that easy to find. Of course, Dave was sitting in the car so I couldn't well direct people to our destination. The best I could manage was vague codespeak about results averaging "around 240, maybe even up to 260" and a conversation about finding a paper on my desk that convinced Cheng I was drunk. Amazingly, the more these calls persisted the more Dave started to believe my lab partner was really working on a Friday night.

Finally, as we're walking down Castro looking for the restaurant, Robin pulls up next to us and honks her horn. Covert was clearly not the word of the day. But we finally had a nice dinner with the birthday dude, which he seemed to appreciate.

We took him to see Hero, quite possibly the most artistic piece of Communist propaganda I'd ever seen. It really showed just what a Western lens we view film through. Things like character development, motivation, realism...we feel gypped out of our $10 when an American movie fails to deliver on them. Yet that wasn't at all what this movie was about. This was one of the rare films you feel like the director was using the screen as a canvas, on which to express artwork that has its own true intrinsic beauty, apart from any real meaning. Of course, it's not hard to apply meaning to the work--about how it subjugates the individual for society, how it glorifies China, whatever. But to get bogged down in that, or in the unlikabilty of the characters, really misses the aesthetic beauty of the film.

Wow, I should have been a fuzzie.

time for a new stylesheet

So after seeing Yune's lovely facelift I must admit to a bit of stylesheet envy. No, inspiration...that's the word. And then when Blogger started plopping its bar right across the top of my masthead (which, admittedly, is nicer than the big banner ads) I had no choice. Necessity is the mother of--oh whatever.

I call this iteration 0, the ripped-off-of-Blogger version. It's a work in progress but what do you think so far?

I'm also trying to decide whether to keep the pop-up comments or switch to the Movable Type style you can see here or here. Which do you people prefer?

what? sleep?

to the tune of: Austin by Blake Shelton

Over the past week, I:

• Saw Paul Wolfowitz as I was eating lunch outside. I was kinda disappointed that he wasn't wildly gesticulating and loudly talking about plans to invade any other countries. Rumor has it his son's living at XOX, in a curious twist of irony.
  
• Walked into the lab to find an NBC reporter interviewing my lab partner. Apparently they ran a story on how even after the Google IPO, yes, the Stanford AI lab is still doing research, as if Google were the end of good ideas to come out of Stanford. Yes, random stock footage of people in front of computers and the Segbot rolling down the street will make sure that secret never gets out.
  
• Took a scenic but unplanned tour of downtown Fremont, trying to find Erin's place.
  
• Discovered Roble Parlor is too small for real traveling dance.
  
• Stayed up all night with dancers and went to iHop for breakfast. My lifelong dream of having a banana split (pancake) for breakfast has been fulfilled. Alas, I fail to see what's so international about IHOP.
  
• Staged what may be the final barbecue at the Rains Work-Free Zone, before Rains may or may not make us move this weekend.
  

<rant>
Currently on my hitlist:

• Rains office: For being extremely coy about where and when we are moving, even inventing imaginary e-mails to justify their shiftiness. And why must we move? Because of...
  
• Rescomp: For ignoring my month-old e-mail about how I have to miss RCC training and assuming I have nothing better to do with my summer but hear about why Stanford students shouldn't download porn.
  
• Northwest Airlines: For not letting us change a credit card-frequent flier mile-purchased plane reservation made by my dad when he could no longer stand waiting for me to confirm at 5 AM. (I was kind of asleep at the time. I wake up to see messages at 4:30, 5:30, and 7:30.) The flight leaves at 8:30 AM...which, despite being the beginning of the day for most denizens of The Real World, is rather difficult to make it to on mass transit, since the Marguerite doesn't start running till 6:30. This calls for the unthinkable. Does anyone have any airline shuttle recommendations?
  
• NBC 11, for not broadcasting strong enough to be picked up without cable. Besides the Olympics, this means I didn't get to see my five seconds of glory. Oh well.
  

</rant>

sheet, i haven't been to work since Wednesday...

to the tune of: The Dangling Conversation by Simon and Garfunkel

not that I haven't been working, mind you. But the beauty of remote login is that I've been telecommuting the last couple days of the week. It's so nice sitting on the couch instead of listening to hacksaws and drills all day... but it can't last forever I guess. Alas...

Friday night was supposed to be karaoke in Kathy's honor. But after a surprise hospital visit, it turned into Coldstone in Kathy's honor instead. All's well that ends well, really. But trying to coordinate three cars of people I felt like...yes, like the director of a counter-terrorism unit in 24. Oh I've been watching too much of that show.

Saturday night we trekked all the way off to Oakland to Gaskell's Ball, an evening of "semi-formal" dance at someplace called the Scottish Rite Temple. There's something creepy about going to someplace calling itself a temple outside a religious context. It's quite an imposing building, and walking inside you get the sense that exclusive secret societies meet there. Like Skull and Bones. Or the Stonecutters.

As if to continue freaking me out, the Ball opened with everyone singing "Rule on, Britannia". I kept waiting for the giant British flag to drop down from the rafters, but instead, we all proceeded to march around in this pretentious British march. Which was fun but long. All in all it was a fine evening, with many polkas and schottisches, and a bunch of pompous set mixers. My favorite was the gallop, which was essentially bumper car galloping. So much fun...

The costumes were great too: there were men in top hats and officer's regalia (even a Royal Mountie), and women in period dresses. Hoop dresses remain a pet peeve because the women who wear them require about a meter of turning radius on the floor, and really careful stepping should you be dancing with one.

Today we went to the beach. Nick is holding photos hostage. Peer pressure will get him to send them.

Should I do an honor's thesis? The 23 units of honors-related incompletes in our apartment are perhaps a warning sign.

please continue to hold

to the tune of: Forbidden Forest by George Winston

Let me just say that the rumors about outsourced Indian tech support are true. I spent an hour on the phone with a certain wireless networking company trying to secure our new access point. The poor woman was clearly just reading off a script, and wanted to give up early and have me bring the thing back to Fry's. (Which I didn't want to do again...let's just say we were lucky the guy there was a big Naruto fan.) But whatever, we have wireless. And the angels rejoiced.

By popular (or maybe just imagined) demand, the photos of The Game and recent birthdays are online...

Tuesday I made it all the way to Redwood City on public transit to get to Swing Central, venturing to the nearby VTA stop in the mythical land of Off-Campus. The College Avenue neighborhood is a quiet little area. But instead of seeing college students sitting outside drinking, as you walk down these tree-lined streets you see a middle-aged man weeding in white khakis clearly not meant for gardening, a smiling father walking a dog as his children mow the lawn and tend the flowers, a pair of older (but not quite "elderly") women power-walking down the street. It resembles the tree-lined streets just off campus in Ann Arbor, but the houses are nicer. They're impressive yet still diminutive.

No, I'm not watching the Perseids tonight, because I have to get up for work in the morning. Ah well.

beyond tired

to the tune of: Endless Column by Blue Man Group

It's funny how after staying up for 24 straight hours you really don't care about sleep. Of course, had you cared that much to begin with you'd have trotted straight off to bed before your transport turned into a pumpkin.

Yes, we just got back from The Game, that beloved Stanford tradition of all-night clue-cracking road rallying madness. Despite the fact that this Game's clues were a bit amateurish in design, we still had fun. I discovered some lesser-frequented but still famous landmarks like the South San Francisco hillside sign and the ridiculously large bust of Junipero Serra. There's something oddly fun about traipsing across hilly brush or climbing around rocky crags by the shore in darkness and fog. Other highlights:

Aria and Guy having a random stranger urinating on a trash can threaten to "smash their fa****y a**es"

Nearly rear-ending a car that had parked on the side of a windy hill in pitch blackness and thick fog for the romantic effect of a completely obscured makeout spot

Discovering that Chinese "chicken flavored biscuits", like many "chicken-flavored" foods, are to be avoided

Freaking out the bored Pixar security guard at 4 AM

When it came time for the penultimate clue, we realized that none of us knew where exactly El Palo Alto, the literal "big stick" was. We knew the general area and so we figured that Palo Altans who lived within walking distance of it should at least know where their town's famous namesake tree is. But no, we asked three separate women where it was and got these responses:

Woman 1: Hmm, I don't know, I just moved here. I think it's over there [points in opposite direction of El Palo Alto[

Woman 2: Well, it's not really a park. You sure you want to go there?

Woman 3: You don't know where it is?

Maybe we just looked like rowdy hooligans ready to burn down The Big Stick...

As much as my mind doesn't want to admit it, it may be time for a nap before I collapse.

what? update?

to the tune of: The Flight of the Bumble Bee: Rimsky-Korsakov, arr. Rachmaninov by Sergei Rachmaninoff

The week's discoveries:

Eight hours of sitting on one's arse can be incredibly tiring. Tuesday night I was planning to go to Swing Central but ended up collapsing for a "short nap" that ended up taking an hour and a half. Oh how many times Safeway's 24-hourness has saved my butt... letting us get stuff for Kelsey's birthday party.

Keg + refrigerator = keggerator. Yes, I saw this product of Stanford engineering grad students ingenuity at a party elsewhere in Rains: a big fridge that looked perfectly ordinary, save for the tap sticking out the side.

Leads dancing hustle are great "big pillars of testosterone". This came after this great conversation between the hustle instructor and one of the dancers:

Instructor: Look at that picture up there. [everyone looks at the picture] The lady is the picture. The man is the frame.
Kat: Wait, where's the lady? [the painting contains no women]
Instructor: You're missing the point.

A big complex menu can serve as a diversion for a sneak attack visible in broad daylight through big floor-to-ceiling windows, like those in the Beckman cafe where we still somehow managed to surprise Kelsey for her birthday.

Every woman Dave knows "is a potential mate". Whether they know it or not. Whether they want to be considered a potential mate or not. Dave is apparently also the self-proclaimed least gay man alive.

Playing Mafia with three loud opinionated people is going to give you a headache and take a loooong time.

In the Rains laundry room, if you have no quarters, no one can hear you curse. I had never come to appreciate working change machines or my flatmates' stashes of quarters until today.

There is such a thing as cream sherry, apparently. And it makes some fine shrimp pasta sauce.