Ages 3 and up

"Keeps the kids entertained during Passover." Yes, you can actually buy a plush collection of all 10 plagues, complete with a little bag labeled "Plagues". Because you never know when you'll want to hurl "an icky boil on a piece of flesh" or a black locust at your friends.

Is it just me or is this a fairly disturbing thing to give to a kid? More disturbing than Latke Larry, that's for sure...

Link from Erika.

hisashiburi ne

Yes, it's been a while. So what's new, you might ask?
Well, the biggest (and heaviest, and most expensive) thing would be my (semi-)new CAR. Yes, after five years of carlessness, I've turned my back on my quasi-hippie who-needs-a-car-this-is-the-Bay-Area vow and bought a car off su.market. I've also committed what in Detroit would be a cardinal sin and bought a Japanese car. But that's OK. I'm just so thrilled to own a car that doesn't remember the first Gulf War and has such modern amenities as intermittent windshield wipers and power door locks. And... it can even do 0-60 in under 30 seconds, which is always a plus.

Also new, but weighing in at much less than two tons, are our new roommates from France. It's a tad weird having half your apartment speak a different language but I guess you get used to it. But yes, the Zone is no longer exclusively a den of CS geeks, which is sad in a way.

Almost as new, and weighing even less than two grown men, is my shiny new computer. Dave and I built our first machines over the summer in a true episode of geek bonding. As we sat there trying to figure out how to pop the faceplates off our new DVD drives, lesson learned: it never hurts to RTFM. Especially when the alternative is brute force... But as a result my old computer has been relegated to media server duty, and so the old photos are down for now.

In other news, I now have a newfound respect for the Roseville Police Department. You might remember my protracted four-month ordeal trying to repair my notebook. In August, portablecomputer.com went dark, but I was able to get the owner of portablecomputer.com on the phone. He claimed to have fixed my computer and that it was ready to ship, only he couldn't because of "server trouble". I tried to explain to him that he didn't need a server to drive to FedEx and ship my bloody computer back, and he promised to do so. Then he canceled his phone service and cell phone. Turned out that his "server trouble" was that the police actually raided his house and confiscated his server--along with 163 notebooks he had promised to repair. So now they're shipping it back to me, hopefully in some salvageable state, and maybe someday I might get my money back...once the DA files charges, and if he has money. We'll see.
 

Japanese TV is so cruel...

Wow. That's Morning Musume, Japan's version of the Spice Girls, who have their own weekly TV show. Apparently they have so little going on that they can face off with a giant lizard. (Maybe they're masochists--they also faced off with Bob Sapp.)

Speaking of which, they apparently like to sneak up on people and force them to speak English, like this choice clip:

Girl 1: Where is the restroom?

Girl 2: I go to elevator.

Girl 1 starts pantomiming either that she's about to puke or that she really needs to pee.

The great thing about this is it reminds me of my first day of Japanese class in sixth grade, when our teacher was teaching us how to ask if we could go to the bathroom:

It's toire wa ii desu ka, which literally means, "Toilet: is it OK?" But that's hard to learn so for the first week just toire will be enough. Or for the first day you can just do this: (points to sign reading "toire wa ii desuka" and jumps up and down holding her gut)

Fortunately, we did have one kid who did exactly that the first day.

latenight playtime

Last weekend was the first Friday Night Waltz DJ'd by Richard Powers in a while. It was soo crowded and so hot. But it was fun...and ended with us testing the kitchen's patience at the Cheesecake Factory till 1:30 AM...

Saturday night was The Game, sort of. It was on campus, and my first bike-powered Game. Which basically meant they could send us from Mirrielees to the modulars all the way on the west side back to the tennis stadium on the east side to the Mausoleum to the north to the Faculty Club to the south...it was exhausting. But we emerged victorious nevertheless.

Best clue ever: A CD labeled "Tunes 4 U", with 45 minutes of music on it. Each song has some random length of silence at the end, which you can find out by ripping the tracks and opening with an audio editor. Then you can take the seconds of silence and the seconds of each track...

...or you could listen to this suspicious quiet part in the middle of track 4, which contained a drumbeat that was spelling out GPS coordinates in binary.

...or you could listen to the song itself on track 4, which is "Bare Necessities" from The Jungle Book:

Don't pick the prickly pear by the paw
When you pick a pear
Try to use the claw
But you don't need to use the claw
When you pick a pear of the big pawpaw
Have I given you a clue?

And then the music fades out abruptly and mysteriously. Anyone know where on campus this was?

Worst clue ever: Ten bags of mini candy bars, meant to be arranged by the year they were first released, then interpreted as Morse code by their manufacturers (Mars or Nestle), yielding "370.21.O35". Now, being techies, we all thought this meant building 370's lecture hall, seat O35, and some useless 21. Maybe it's readily obvious to anyone who actually gets books out of the library that this is a call number. (Is it? My informal study of one fuzzie seems to say so.) But it turns out that if you go look this book up in Socrates you get:

The wilderness and the laurel tree; a guide for teachers and parents on the observation of children. O'Gorman, Ned. Holding in EDUCATION.

You might think that you're meant to go to the Education library, where the book resides, or perhaps Bing Nursery, where children are observed. Nope. Turns out there's a modular called Laurel that's waaay over here, nestled among other obscure, identical-looking modulars named Oak, Poplar, and Acacia in a "wilderness" of trailers.

No wonder that clue took us an hour and a half to get...

summer = lazy

to the tune of: Lay Me Down by Crosby Nash

Oh it's so tempting. The Marguerite now has a bus that stops right outside our complex and goes straight to Gates in six minutes flat. I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but that's pretty sweet. Though I'll still get the exercise and bike into work, plowing over errant teenage campers on my way if need be. But on rainy days I can definitely see it coming in handy.

Or another thing it's useful for is going to the UPS store. Not that I do that that often, but I've been dealing with UPS a lot lately. See, I finally got my notebook back after it broke and I sent it in for repairs. Which originally "should only take a few days", but that turned into weeks, and then into...four months? I spent much of the past two weeks calling the place daily to nag them about it when they finally realized it was repaired and sitting in a box on a shelf somewhere ready to go, as it had been for nearly a week. Grr...

So then it takes a few tries for UPS to deliver it because we're all at work during the day and they shipped it home instead of to my office like I asked. But I finally got it, turned it on and...it booted! Once. Then it didn't start the next ten times. Uh oh. So I finally got it working long enough to back up the only important data on it...only now the screen flickers and turns off randomly. Excellent.

So now I have a firm deadline from this company, by when they'll have either fixed it or refunded my money. And all the data I care about on CD. Come to think of it, back up any of your important stuff now. It occurred to me since then that I have almost 3 GB of photos that exist only on my hard drive, which I'd be really sad to lose. (Well maybe I don't need all 5000 of them, but still...)

With the notebook (semi-)safely in the hands of the repair place, I've turned my attention to building a sweet desktop. It's exciting to watch the pieces come together as they inch their way across the country from warehousese in LA and Pennsylvania...no it's not! I want the pieces now! Now!

In other news, exciting discovery of the night: duck pizza! Surprisingly good...

a dry gulch

Last Thursday night I went with Laura and Andrew to a Rascal Flatts concert in Concord. It was a great show, and quite an experience. I'd been to country music concerts in Michigan before (in particular at the State Fair), and this was a tad different. First, rather than the redneck crowd who'd come to the State Fair to watch the tractor pull, these folks were I guess what you'd call fashionable rednecks. Never have I seen so many pink cowboy (cowgirl?) hats. I'm sorry, you just don't see that in the South. (Though you don't see too many Google shirts there either.) Opening act Blake Shelton teased the crowd:

They told me you Californians might not really appreciate country music. I dunno. Are y'all hardworkin'? Beer-drinkin'? In-breedin'? Oops, maybe not in-breedin'.

Yes, this was a California country concert, a fact Rascal Flatts made a point of reminding us no fewer than 24 times. And only in California would the putrid odor of pot waft across a country concert... And there were tons of teenage girls there, four of whom could not stop screaming every thirty seconds. You'd think their throats would get hoarse but no. They could've been getting stabbed and it'd sound much the same I imagine.

But Friday night we headed out "where the grass and the dirt and the gravel all meet": camping at Arroyo Seco with Guy, Helen, Dan, Laura, Andrew, and Nick. Google proved sadly impotent at locating this campsite, and the written directions we got were simple but they made me skeptical. Somehow even after having been let down by MSN Maps so many times, I still feel more comfortable having independent verification of where this place is, like a map. Especially because the exit listed in the directions didn't exist. So we didn't realize we'd gone past it until we got to a city that looked decidedly unlike the Ventana Wilderness. (Once again, a problem that would be solved if only California would number its bloody exits.) Fortunately Dan had old-fashioned paper maps in the car and we eventually found our way. But, despite our best efforts, not before dark.

fire in the sky

to the tune of: King of Swing by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy

Hey, the summer's not supposed to go by so quickly! July opened with a Friday Night Waltz where Joan Walton played enough John Philips Sousa marches to make me wonder if 76 trombones were about to stomp onto the dance floor, followed by the traditional post-waltz ice cream binge.

The little Altima I've been courting, it turns out, has major alignment problems, since its driver never seemed to think it was a problem that her car is predisposed to veering off the road. But nothing $140 can't fix... now I just need to convince the owner that she should help pay for it since she's been negligent in maintaining it. I think buying a car will be just the thing to knock me into the kind of poverty most other grad students find themselves in. But if I'm going to deal with this RCC job I better get some perks out of it... (free Internet just doesn't quite cut it)

Sunday Kat and I went to a party at a gorgeous purple house in Mountain View. I was a little concerned it would turn out to be gaudy Yahoo! purple or fairytale pastel purple, but somehow it was a happy medium. I never thought there was a tactful shade of purple you could paint a house, but that was it. You'd never tell from the front yard, since middle-class MV homes are crammed together pretty tightly along the street, but they had a huge backyard with a sweet garden, where they were growing their own lettuce, herbs, fruits, and berries. I'd always assumed I'd just end up living in a ho-hum apartment somewhere in Silicon Valley suburbia, but living in a place like that with a few roommates who'd be willing to chip in to do housework and such would be pretty cool. Naturally, with Valley geeks in residence, they'd installed a projector in their living room (giving them a 91" screen, Deb kept telling everyone) and a home media server to stream TV shows and music all across the house. I'm not sure whether that or the garden is cooler, but something tells me most apartments wouldn't be too keen on letting you dig up their grass OR bolt things to the ceiling.

We bailed on the party early to get ready for our expedition to see Big Bad Voodoo Daddy at Frost. Of course, only half our party was actually ready to leave on time, but we headed over, picnic dinner in tow, to stand in line for half an hour for what ended up being damn good chair seats. But it was well-worth the wait--the concert was awesome. I've never been up so close to any (relatively) famous band. BBVD started playing in the middle of the crowd and marched up the aisle to the stage. We made our way to the mosh pit for some mosh--...er ,swing dancing! We eventually got a spotlight circle going where Swingtime folk showed off and the rest of us stepped in tentatively for a few bars. Afterward we had great seats for fireworks, apparently being set off by Candace and the Registrar.

On the 4th, we had a barbecue that went pretty well, despite its organizer bailing on it at the last minute. But we figured out how to grill stuff, the boys becoming men as it were. Then we ran around campus trying to sneak a peek at the dual fireworks shows in Redwood City and Mountain View from Mirrielees.

stay hungry, stay foolish

to the tune of: Better off Alone by Alice Deejay

Commencement Weekend #2 was still fun, even if I didn't get any diplomas out of it. I went to the Night Before Party, which I missed last year, and got to see Ben's final Harmonics performance (well, until the alumni song at spring show next year) and Dave and Meg's swing solo. Then came karaoke. There's a reason why the folks who invented karaoke have private booths for small groups of singers instead of a large performance hall. We had to sit through performances by people we didn't know that alternated between incredible (the Harmonics stacked a few singers on deck...not fair!) and truly saddening (sorry, three teenage girls do not do Garth Brooks justice). But we got in a fun group performance of Greased Lightning and a stirring rendition of Oklahoma!, a tribute to Dave and Joe Fairbanks' home state.

The actual Commencement Day was much cooler than last year, thankfully. Wacky Dance didn't seem to work as well as last year, but it was still a great time for photo-ops. Steve Jobs gave a pretty good Commencement address, thankfully not rubbing in too much the fact that he never graduated from college and still has more money than all of us put together. Maybe his best line was:

...you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

I spent the next week saying goodbyes and helping people moved. Then my family flew out to meet me on what turned out to be the only rainy weekend this month. Aside from getting rear-ended in SF by a careless teenager who was busy flirting with her boyfriend, we had a great time touring Sonoma wineries. I did my first wine tasting--maybe I just don't know anything about wine or maybe I was just stuffed up from the cold I had, but I had a hard time telling the difference between, say, a 2002 Cabernet Sauvignon and a 2003 Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon.

It's amazing how many "microclimates" the Bay Area has: while we were getting rained on in Sonoma, it was apparently clear and sunny in San Jose. But fortunately that meant that the clouds on Saturday stayed north of the Golden Gate Bridge (maybe to avoid paying the toll), which meant that for once it was sunny in San Francisco! I never thought this possible, but indeed we were able to get great views of the Bridge in Golden Gate Park. (Note: Let me know if you have trouble with that link and what browser you're using... some rogue browser seems to like turning %20s into +s for some reason.) The Palace of Fine Arts also looks much cooler in bright daylight.

This week is going to be exciting: Kat comes back from Paris, Irish dancing in Berkeley, Friday Night Waltz, a Big Bad Voodoo Daddy concert, and a Fourth of July barbecue are all in the works.

holy crap, i think he updated

to the tune of: Drumbone by Blue Man Group

Whoa. OK, so it's been a month. In my defense, it's been a busy month. And I've got the pictures to prove it...

The last month flew by. Ben's last Harmonics spring show, Dave's Swingtime spring show, and Becky and Kendra's first Decadance spring show all were awesome. Ben was a scorned mime; Dave danced to Dragostea Din Tei.

In the midst of finals I thought it was a good idea to begin my quest for a new car. So far it's been foiled at every turn: every car out there either is really old, has too many miles, is ridiculously expensive, or gets snapped up by someone immediately. You snooze, you lose on su.market. One guy had me wait around at the econ building for half an hour before eventually telling me he sold the car to someone else while I was there. Like vultures these people are. But...I have a date with a '97 Altima tonight so it'll be OK.

Guy and Stewart both had the misfortune of having birthdays during finals week. Helen really wanted to surprise Guy, and was really excited about blindfolding him for some reason. So we hatched a plan for after finals: we'd abduct Guy, put him in the car, and start driving. Instead of pulling up at a restaurant, he'd emerge at a beach near Santa Cruz. And that's what we did. Well, almost. Since Dave's convertible didn't have enough room for us all I wound up in Stewart's car. We were supposed to go ahead and set things up for when Guy got there. And Dave was supposed to get the food ahead of time so I could put it in Stewart's SUV. Turns out on the big day Dave found out he had to work and help Kate move out, so he couldn't get to Safeway early. So Stewart's car makes a rendezvous with him at Safeway to pick up the food and we set off, thinking Dave was going to head back home to abduct Guy, and they'd give us a 15 minute head start but still arrive by sundown. But an hour later when we got to Santa Cruz we found out they hadn't left yet. Turns out he got suckered into more moving, while Helen was desperately trying to distract Guy from thinking about dinner by making him help her with her paper.

Dave returned home and they're all set to blindfold Guy when Helen slammed Ben's finger in a door. So they took time out trying to ice his finger and keep the swelling down. Eventually they did blindfold Guy and put him in the car and take off--going the wrong way on 280. They almost got to Half Moon Bay before they realized what was going on and turned around. Helen was talking about bringing her notebook to work on her paper when someone blurted out, "How are you going to write your paper on the beach?", giving Guy a big hint. Then Dave's car started making strange noises so they pulled over to investigate. Then they needed to stop for gas and Guy needed to use the restroom. But Helen insisted on leaving the blindfold on, so she and Ben had to guide Guy to the bathroom. Of course, Ben had a Safeway bag of ice on his right hand, which looked somewhat suspicious placed against the small of a blindfolded man's back. So they were drawing weird looks and when the attendant started making a phone call they decided to get out quickly. Dave called and told me they were in Scotts Valley, giving Guy another clue. By the time they arrived, the sun had gone down and we had made camp. But we still grilled some burgers on our campfire and a good time was had by all.

By the way, this is why you don't want to be the last one up when it's time to take down the tents. Ben awoke to find his tent collapsed on him.

things that are sweet

to the tune of: The Tower by Vienna Teng

Exhibit A: A most excellent strawberry chocolate mousse cake prepared by Kathy and Helen for my birthday. With homemade whipped cream and everything. Oh so good. And without any baking (but with much licking of spatulas and mixers).

Exhibit B: Dave's mom made us spaghetti on Mother's Day. We insisted that we should be the ones cooking for her, but she insisted even more, and well, there's no arguing with a determined Southern mother on Mother's Day.

Exhibit C: A whipped cream pie. It's pretty sweet. Just makes you want to stick your whole face in it. Or have it all come flying at your face, as it were. So I spent a week trying to cajole lecturers and TAs to take a pie in the face at the CS Spring Party. And one of them insisted that I do it too. So why not? Who could possibly want to pie their dear Course Advisor?

Well, a lot of people, apparently. I tied with one of the lecturers for cs106a in money raised. All together though, we raised $157 for Camp Amelia, so I'd say it was worth it. Fun fact: whipped cream left in your hair or on your clothes starts to smell.

Exhibit D: Big Dance! Kevin and I won the helium balloon cross-step waltz race, proving that you don't need a woman to waltz. I scored a free ticket to Friday Night Waltz and a "female" hair appointment (since I was following). So any ladies need a haircut or whatever else they do for you with $25 of your money?

And...we saw Vienna Teng perform! The crappy acoustics of Roble didn't do her justice, so people kept dancing back and forth in front of her piano to hear her sing.

People still give me weird looks when I tell them about dancing all night, but I wasn't alone: 211 others made it through all nine hours.


Where's Waldo?

And afterward, more sweet crepes at Laura's apartment...followed by the sweetest thing of all: a few hours' sleep.

nice try

to the tune of: Ordinary Day by Vanessa Carlton

There's something empowering about closing an account. Like dumping an abusive girlfriend or dropping an abusive class. I called Chase and got some lady speaking broken English in a very thick Chinese accent, who immediately transferred me to an "account supervisor". Apparently threatening to close your account means you merit people who actually speak English. This supervisor tried all these tactics to get me to stay:

• Offering to block all those damn Payment Protector sales calls and e-mails. Finally!
  
• Wishing me a happy belated birthday. My personal favorite, since my birthday was a month ago.
  
• Offering to lower my APR. Aw, that's sweet of them. Make it easier for me to carry a balance. NO!
  
• Lecturing me on how important it is to pay my bills. Um, what the hell? So I missed a couple payments and I'm ditching them for a card that, among other things, sends me reminders when I haven't paid the bill.
  

Nope. Not even tempted. It's over.

Would you throw a pie at a lecturer for charity? How about a course advisor? It's been suggested that I put my, er, whipped cream where my mouth is and put myself on the block just like the lecturers. And sure, I'd do it, but would anyone actually have reason to throw a pie at me? It's not like I gave them a rough midterm or something...

so it's come to this...

to the tune of: Cruel Spell by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy

We figured this would motivate us to, um, actually graduate. Or at least think about it. And it has succeeded in getting all of us to at least count how many units we need. Of course, working for the CS student services manager, I can't really hide the fact that I haven't turned in my program sheet from, um, last year?

notebookless...

to the tune of: Snow on the Sahara by Stanford Harmonics

You're sitting in a boring morning lecture. You're struggling to stay awake as the professor rambles on and on through some esoteric phenomenon that he--and only he--thinks is incredibly interesting. And all around you you hear the soft tappity tap tap of neighbors' fingers on their notebooks. Why is the temptation so irresistible to read over their shoulders? You know it's just going to be mundane e-mail, IM, or coding, but there might be an interesting article on someone's screen. But then you catch yourself spying on other people and feel guilty so you avert your eyes to stare feebly at the Daily you hold on your lap, hopefully out of the prof's line-of-sight.

Trouble is, you've already read everything on the front page that you care to (and even a couple articles you couldn't care less about). And now you can't find a way to open the paper discreetly enough without making painfully loud crinkling noises or giving yourself away to the prof.

It's sad, but I need my notebook to keep me sane in such classes. I think I actually pay better attention when I have something else to do to keep me awake.

I came to the sad realization that I may never fill up my Gmail account after all. When they first made their claim "never delete e-mail again!" I was getting around 200 MB of spam a month--so I thought I could test their claim by the time I graduated surely. Then they started deleting spam... No fair! Now it'll take me over a year to even get to 1 GB... and they're adding storage faster than I can fill it. Maybe I need to go rejoin all those mailing lists. Then again, maybe not.

Housing has been unnecessarily suspenseful. The Zone next year will have one Harmonic and one man whose name starts with D. But they'll be the same person. Ben's graduating and Dave waited until 2 hours before the draw deadline to decide to move out with him. Now we have to see if we can get Brendan in, even though SymSys refuses to tell him whether he's been accepted into grad school, and Housing refuses to let him apply. Whee...

i am so old...

to the tune of: Conventioneers by Barenaked Ladies

Last Sunday night I got a call at 11 PM from a mysterious deep-voiced gentleman.

"Is this Michael J. Brzozowski?"

Lucky me. I must've won the Publisher's Clearinghouse sweepstakes. Funny, I don't remember entering that. That middle initial is serious business though. Only credit card companies know that... and Stanford people. But what am I going to say? Guy already told Deep Voice I was home.

"Yes."
"I have top-secret information for you. Go to the Marguerite stop at Campus and Bowdoin." (click)

Go to a bus stop in the dark at 11 PM based solely on a phone call? Sure, why not? So I set off, my flatmates accompanying me for protection. The street corner was devoid of sketchy people in trenchcoats (and Marguerites) so we kinda stood around until Ben noticed a slip of paper taped to the bus stop sign. It was a game clue. Excellent! And so it began.

Twenty or thirty minutes later, the clues led us back home, where a throng of people had crammed themselves into my very messy room and were about to run out of oxygen when I opened the door. Surprise! Thanks everyone!

blue light special

to the tune of: Strawberry Wine by Deana Carter

So maybe the celebration was premature. My desktop started overheating again, and I discovered the CPU fan was dying. Bless my little Athlon that it gracefully cuts power instead of melting down. But I conned Kendra into taking me to Fry's and got a new fan and an even more powerful power supply. So powerful it emits a soothing blue glow out the back. Well, actually, that's the LEDs put in there for that purpose. It looks kinda cool...if you're behind the computer. From the front it almost looks eerily possessed, or maybe as if it were about to jump to warp speed or something.

Lesson learned: in a pinch, a little masking tape can stand in for screws. Let's just say it's best not to shake zozobox.

Of course, now that I have zozobox working happily, zozobook died. Won't even turn on. I'm fearing some sort of display failure and just hope the LCD doesn't need to be replaced (read: bye bye tax refund). Anyone know of any non-exorbitantly priced places that fix Sony notebooks?

Get perpendicular! Just look at all those bits boogie-ing. If you've ever seen Schoolhouse Rock, you'll appreciate this even more. If you've never seen bits disco'ing (and who hasn't these days?) even better.

It's been a long week, with a couple all-nighters. But at least it's been really nice outside...

But we did managed to get a paper published, "Evaluating Multicast Applications Using Wearable Algorithms". Don't worry, no knowledge of multicast applications or wearable algorithms is necessary to appreciate this paper.

the box is back

Reports of zozobox's death have been greatly exaggerated. I endured a ride in the backseat of Dave's car (behind Dave, who needs all the legroom he can get), and a protracted urinal discussion at Fry's over the best place to buy The Incredibles, but the new power supply is in, and all the pics are back online.

silence

is the sound in my room without the hum of zozobox's fan. Sadness. Looks like the power supply blew on zozobox, and I haven't put the new one in yet so all of the links and media below hosted on zozo.stanford.edu will be offline until further notice. Well, the pictures will magically start working again, which means it's come back up. Whenever that happens.

Wooooo spring break!

::blows off dust::

to the tune of: Surely Justice by Daryll-Ann

Oh right, I haven't updated in over a month. Well, let's see. What's happened since then?

There was this dance, Viennese Ball. I had a great time, a lovely date (at left), and our performance (with my excellent partner, at right) went better than ever! (Photos) I also have a (Jason-centric) video of the performance filmed by Jason's parents, featuring, among other things, Bravman's fiancee.

There was the ever-enduring struggle looking for jobs for the summer. I really think recruiters live in some sort of alternate universe where we college students are just sitting around on our thumbs with nothing better to do but apply for a job with them. Consider the following experiences (if you don't know who these companies are, IM me):

• One company I'd never even heard of wanted me to drop everything in midterms week to go take an off-campus proficiency test before they'd even interview me.
  
• Another took my resume at a job fair and online, assured me they'd contact me, and then told me that they really thought I was qualified to be a "vector arithmetic intern", which turns out to involve rewriting low-level system code to use vectors so it runs faster on this company's processor. Which is funny, because I can't even vectorize Matlab code, and nothing on my resume even remotely implies I'd be qualified or even interested in this job. My guess is no one else wanted this job either, and so they started asking random people they didn't want to take seriously to interview for this position instead. I e-mailed them, politely asking why they thought I was qualified, and got no response.
  
• Another made me sit outside and wait for half an hour while the previous interview ran over because the interviewer didn't think it necessary to bring a watch. Or my resume, as it turned out.
  
• Another kept e-mailing me to set up a technical interview, and I kept e-mailing them times I was available, which they ignored and assigned me to slots that I couldn't make. I never did schedule a tech interview with them because they kept screwing with the date.
  
• Another scheduled an onsite interview for me. But they forgot to tell the people who were interviewing me that. So I find myself nervously waiting in the lobby, watching other applicants come in and head off to interviews, and the recruiter I'd talked to was about to send me home when one of them popped out and saved the day at the last minute.
  
• A call from a recruiter telling Helen I should be at my computer at a certain time, without leaving so much as an e-mail address for me to complain if that time shouldn't work for me. You don't call them, they call you.
  

In the end though, I aborted the job search once I got a research gig for the summer and decided it was the best way to prepare for a possible Ph.D application. But not before I got a second round interview and a job offer. It's such a great ego-booster: External validation that I have marketable skills.

It was nice being able to sleep in Saturday mornings. Of course, this could only last so long, as a certain class induced several all-night coding sessions, though thankfully within the safe confines of the Sleep-Free Zone instead of Sweet Hall, the second floor of which I vow never to set foot on again. We discovered that operating system source code is far more interesting when read in a foreign accent, and we cycled through a variety of them. We cracked ourselves up. And made others question our sanity, perhaps.

We finally made up for our sadly bungled attempt to surprise Dave last August for his birthday by getting him when he least suspected it: his half-birthday. A complete success, and oh was he surprised...

In a cruel twist of fate, it was ridiculously nice outside during Dead Week when we should be studying and is flooding streets now that we have time on spring break. But whatever. But biking around in shorts as the plum blossoms bloom outside our apartment while people at certain other schools were slogging through snowstorms on their way to class, I could hardly complain.

sex, love, and...waltz?

to the tune of: Windmills by UO On The Rocks

Oh it's been a busy week.

So it turns out that yes, Cingular did cut off my service for about 12 hours, and no, I wasn't pleased. Even after talking to the cut off your toes-style collection agency, and even after paying them everything I owed them. And they could make no promises that they wouldn't do it again. So once again, anyone who has a choice don't sign up with Cingular.

Friday was a rapid-fire succession of midterm, dance, lunch, trip to Palo Alto with Kat, dance lesson, performance, and Friday Night Waltz. Expensive tuxes are so complex. Now granted, I have no idea how most ball gowns work, but I doubt they have as many detachable (and losable) parts and adjustable parts. And they don't have as many layers I suspect. But after our performance Jason and I decided to go to Friday Night Waltz fashionably late. Very fashionably. And very late. It's amazing how many more people want to dance with you when you're wearing a tux than blue jeans. We did get a few weird stares, the best of which came from the guy in a suit who used to be the best-dressed man there until we showed up and stole his thunder.

Lesson learned: Tails are cool, but jacket is hot. We'll see how long the jacket stays on Friday night. With the last dress rehearsal over, the reality sinks in: Aaaaah, Viennese is Friday!

I got this amusing questionnaire from soc lecture on Wednesday. My favorite? Why do you insist on flaunting your heterosexuality? Can't you just be who you are and keep it quiet?

Random culinary discovery (hold your judgment until you try it): Goldfish on pizza. Hey, it's just like adding cheddar cheese...

And now it's time to finish our 140 project over the next 18 hours. Whee...

zozo the deadbeat

to the tune of: Radetzky March by Strauss

It seems I've been delinquent. Delinquent in updating this blog. And delinquent in paying my wireless bill, which has currently swelled to over $247.

Why, you ask? Because they're still overcharging me for a phone I never ordered, and they haven't been too interested in rectifying this problem since I called them back in October. But apparently someone must have noticed because I've been turned over to a cut off your toes-style collections agency.

I was standing outside Gates talking to Kendra and my research advisor when my phone rang. The shadowy caller blocked caller ID so I thought it was someone calling from a dorm. But no, when I answered the phone I was talking to a husky-sounding man who sounded like he could come hunt me down and break my kneecaps. They get their most intimidating-sounding people to hound people to pay their bills I guess. Turns out this was in fact a Cingular customer service rep.

To make a long and not particularly interesting story involving another hour of phone time short, I may or may not have phone service come tomorrow. Cingular remains on my hit list.

In other news, I shamelessly plug, as heckled at Flicks and derided in a Daily column: Viennese Ball!. Free dance lessons start Saturday if you don't know how to dance but still want to experience "one night of strappy blackness". 2.5 weeks left and the entire Opening is finally choreographed, including tonight's little workshop on walking and bowing.

If I ever donate to the Stanford Fund (oh no, that's The Stanford Fund with a capital 'T'), I'm going to be sure to make it contingent on students not having to write any of those bloody letters. Speaking of which, and delinquency, I need to go start them now...

ahhh, i'm back..

Over break I learned my parents' list of Subtle Ways to Wake Mike Up:

Burst into the room to check your e-mail

Ring the doorbell

Call the house

Vacuum the whole downstairs

Use a leaf blower outside

But I'm back in the Bay now, on Caltrain after a harrowing race to the AirTrain, and then BART. Someone actually published a study on how awful BART ticket machines are and how hard they are to figure out. I never really appreciated that until now. (You would think they would have done something about it after achieving such notoriety. You would be wrong.) They demands money without telling you how much or what for; you're supposed to look that up on a chart first. But it doesn't like just any dollar bill...oh no, it's quite selective. Naturally you can't use a credit card to buy less than $20 of BARTness, or if you can I couldn't figure out how to do it in the 10 seconds I thought I had. Finally I found $2 and just resigned myself to get gypped out of 50 cents. I still don't really have time to read so I push the button next to the thing that looks like a ticket. Nope, the most alluring option is an expensive BART Plus ticket, which I didn't care to figure out what was. Finally I get my stupid ticket, charge through the gate, and just make it onto the train, only to sit there at the station for 5 minutes anticlimactically, as if BART were laughing at me.

Lesson learned: It takes exactly 22 minutes to get from row 19 of a Northwest flight full of people in no particular hurry to get off to a BART train, including a bathroom stop. All in all, not bad.

Another discovery: Life Aquatic: Weird movie. Funny at times. But way more of Bill Murray in a Speedo than I needed.

And a massage is the perfect antidote to six hours of Northwest.

10...9...oh dick, we love you...7...6...dick, wish you were here...4...3...did we mention dick's not here?...1...happy new year!

Yes, happy new year everyone! I was ready to shoot Regis and getting a little sick of the Dick Clark lovefest but, yup, that ball dropped right on schedule. There's something great about having Colin Powell be in charge of pushing The Button, cause he tries so hard to do the same thing in his day job...

It's green again! All the snow is gone, washed away in a freak rainstorm and warm day. "How long until it gets cold again?" Dad had to ask while we were walking the dog. Sure enough, it plummeted 30 degrees within 12 hours. Nice going, Dad. Although tonight's ice will be gone come Sunday. Michigan weather is fickle.

All in all it's been a quiet break. Got a nice dose of euchre...if I didn't get so rusty throughout the year I probably wouldn't suck so much now. And I got my snow and kielbasa for the year. And more than enough family politics.

Someday soon I'm gonna have to stop staying up till 5 AM. But not today...