"Today's discomfort index will be 87.2."

...so said the weather forecast on TV this morning. And they weren't kidding: the first thing I noticed stepping outside was the heat. The second thing I noticed were the cicadas: they're out in full force, an almost deafening sound that makes you feel like you could be attacked by a swarm of locusts at any minute.

Against my better judgment, I hiked up (part of) Bomunsan, a local mountain. I got a decent view of the city but was wiped out afterwards. So I wandered the streets looking for someplace to eat that looked (a) air conditioned and (b) big enough to have an English menu. I eventually wound up in a barbecue place that was really tasty.

Apparently I'm failing to communicate the Korean line for Do you speak English? While I guess it's not strictly necessary, as I'd find out quickly enough by throwing English at people, but I wanted to learn the Korean phrase for this so I don't come across as assuming that everyone speaks English. As it turns out, all I'm getting across is that I don't speak Korean. This phrase has been met with confused looks every time I say it...I suspect I'm not pronouncing English correctly.

My linguistic (mis)adventures continued when I ducked out of the heat midday into a supermarket. A couple of friends requested specific items from Korea: kim chi-flavored seaweed, and barley tea. This turned out to be harder than I thought. The place was unnerving enough with store workers at every turn shouting out some sale. But I eventually found the seaweed. I was hoping at least one of them would have some little kim chi icon. No dice. I even memorized the Korean characters for kim chi, but couldn't find them on any of the bags there. The barley tea it turned out was conveniently labeled in English, but the only English words on these packages were self-evident ones devoid of meaning, like flavor and quality.

So I asked someone in my fractured Korean. The problem was I didn't know the word for seaweed. So as much as I pointed to the seaweed, she thought I was just confused and took me over to the kim chi. It turns out that the word for seaweed is kim. And somehow I couldn't quite get beyond "kim chi type kim".

Other discoveries: yes, the video game channel is real. But there's also televised Go. Even more agonizingly slow to watch than to watch someone planning their Starcraft moves.

Tomorrow will be just as hot. And I'll be in a suit. But (hopefully) in well-air-conditioned buildings...

"I pray to God for an affordable car"

Lately I've been growing increasingly cavalier about packing for domestic travel. When visiting my parents, I could always count on them to have an extra bar of soap; even the most podunk of Southern rural towns has a Wal-Mart to get forgotten items. So it was somewhat impressive that I should get everything packed up at the last minute on Sunday, given that I only discovered at 9 PM that I needed to bring a suit. I swear, next time I'll plan ahead.

The flight was amazing. From the moment you sit in the terminal and listen to the Singapore Airlines agents making uber-polite announcements, the United agents next door sound like heartless bastards. I had twelve hours of being pampered, and got kim chee fried rice on the plane. All of which makes American airlines even harder to go back to.

Getting off the plane we all shuffled into health inspection, everyone trying their hardest not to cough. H1N1 paranoia is high here; masked inspectors took everyone's temperatures (though calmly in the terminal, not in hazmat suits on the plane like that one YouTube video shows). I've already been given three pamphlets about the warning signs of the flu.

In the terminal at Incheon, I saw four car commercials, conveniently subtitled in English. Hyundai and Kia apparently own this place. The most amusing showed a series of scenes where people say things like, "I pray to God for a minivan I can afford", and of course the punchline, "Thanks to Hyundai, you don't have to pray any more!" Something about claiming your company is answering people's prayers seems just a little sacrilegious.

So far, my feeble attempts at speaking Korean seem to have gone unappreciated by the locals. Maybe the airport staff are just more jaded, but no one seems impressed by my impressive vocabulary of "hello" and "thank you". Fortunately the conference staff has had student volunteers to meet me at the airport and at the bus stop.

But now I'm here in Daejeon, in a nice hotel with a great view of the city, and I'm intent to go roam around for a day, armed only with a phrasebook and a collection of tourist maps. I hear there's a free "foot spa" down the street. Rock on.

Two thousand five hundred ninety two

This infographic from the New York Times is a beautifully rich visualization of something that often gets reduced to a single statistic: the number of soldiers and security officers who died last year in Iraq violence. The stark small multiple of little people--one for every casualty--calls out the thousands of individual tragedies and shows how each died: some in firefights, some in bombings, still others by torture. The other thing that grabs you is how many of these deaths aren't even Americans--the American media tends to focus only on the 901 U.S. troops who died last year. Iraqi soldiers and police officers seem to be bearing quite a burden themselves.

Whether or not you believe the Iraqi war serves some greater good, it's hard to look at this and not be in awe at the sheer scale.

Google Reader's gaffe: you can't fake a social graph

Over the holiday break, Google snuck in a little "tweak" to ther RSS reader, Google Reader. The idea was simple: why not make it easy to share your favorite posts with a single click? Before, there was a little Share button that posted items to a public feed with a hidden URL. Only people you gave the URL to could see these items. But what if you could share things with your friends automatically?

Problem: who exactly are your friends? Google let Facebook eat its lunch in the social networking space, but it does have zillions of Gmail and Google Talk users. Any Gmail user you send email to gets added to your Google Talk contact list. Not all of them are actually friends. So a number of users were a bit miffed to discover their shares suddenly broadcast to all these people. People wear lots of different hats, and just like teenagers don't necessarily share their LiveJournals with their parents, you might not want to share every amusing Digg post with your grandma.

To be clear, Google doesn't appear to share Reader items with people who don't have Gmail or GTalk accounts. (It still does share things with people I know I've never chatted with.) And Google has now offered a workaround to restrict sharing, and there's a setting to remove people from this service. And to be fair, I've discovered a few interesting tidbits from my friends. But the interesting lesson here is how communication doesn't necessarily imply friendship.

Since their social network Orkut doesn't get much use (outside of Brazil at least), Google's trying to infer a social graph with their communications services. They're certainly not the first--people have tried using email to deduce social networks for ages. But email is a poor proxy for friendship.

To see why, if you've been using Facebook and Gmail for a while, try this simple experiment: Go to Facebook's Friend Finder and give it your Gmail account and password. (You trust them, don't you?) Be sure to uncheck the box "Select All Friends", then scroll through the list. Everyone you've ever emailed with Gmail who has a Facebook account is in this list. How many of them are really your friends? For me, only about 40% of the Facebook users I've emailed are actually friends--the rest are random cc's caught up in a "reply all", university staff, recruiters for jobs I no longer want, etc.

The answer, of course, just like with Facebook Beacon, is opt-in: out of all the people you've ever emailed, you might want to share things with some of them. Or perhaps framed another way: out of all the people you've ever emailed, only some of them are friends.

How many of your Gmail "friends" are Facebook friends?

Helpful hint: when suing Google for $5 billion...

for alleged "crimes against humanity" by knowingly choosing to name themselves with an anagram of some of your social security number upside down, putting you at risk of a "terrorist attack"...

...it's generally not necessary to include in your (public record) court filing your driver's license, bank account number, and debit card records.

The details of Google's brilliant nefarious scheme are on page 18 of this pdf (with some help from the Philadelphia 76'ers).

You can't make this stuff up.

Some quetchup with your spam?

In the past few days I've gotten a couple invites to some sort of new social network called Quetchup, even some from people I didn't even recognize. Let's call this Odd Thing #1. But I'm a sucker for social networks (it is, after all, my job to study them) so I went ahead and clicked a link to "join Rowyn and his friends today". Never mind that Rowyn is, in fact, a woman. Odd Thing #2.

Signing up is a three-step process. On the first step, they ask you to choose a screen name, along with your first and last name. Don't worry, though, your first and last name "will not be visible" and "will be kept strictly confidential". (So what exactly do they need them for?) Odd Thing #3. Call me a Facebook (or Friendster) snob, but this is one of the most infuriating things about MySpace: not being able to find people you know in real life because people hide behind cutesy screen names. They also wouldn't let me sign up until I told them how I heard about Quetchup, which was a little odd since I just clicked through a mammoth URL purportedly from Rowyn. Odd Thing #4.

But the piece de resistance here, and the reason I caution anyone who wants to try out this site, is that Step 2 of the process demands your login for one of the Webmail services, and informs you that by providing this you give consent for them to invite everyone in your address book. Odd thing #5. Since Gmail adds every single person you ever replied to to your address book, this ain't so hot. This scores Quetchup a special place in the circle of hell previously reserved for Plaxo and Facebook apps that automatically "notify" your friends. I supplied an old hotmail account that surely didn't have anyone to spam.

And finally, when it was all said and done, I wasn't even Rowyn's friend. Odd Thing #6. I went through all that to sign up, and she still had to explicitly approve me as a friend. (Perhaps this is because she didn't explicitly ask Quetchup to spam me in the first place.)

And even when I did become her friend, I couldn't see her name. So now I have an account on a social network with one friend. I'm afraid to let it scan a list of people I've emailed to see who else is on the site because it'll spam them all. I can't search for anyone by name because names are "confidential". It's like MySpace without the personality.

Which is too bad because they have some interesting ideas ported over from Friendster, like letting you see your second-degree friends (friends of friends), who may well be your actual friends in real life. Facebook still has yet to do this, even though people who many of your friends know on the site may actually know you in real life. And no app developer can do this either, since it's against the Facebook developer terms of service.

Not just gimpy. Disabled

Yup. It's official. Yesterday I went to the DMV. One hour and $6 later, I had an official disabled parking permit. I felt weird joining the ranks with the elderly lady with a walker in front of me, but then a pain in my ankle had me sitting right beside her.

This tendinitis/bursitis/plantar fascitis (yes, apparently I have all three) hasn't gotten much better over the last month. It's like playing whac-a-mole with different tendons and ligaments. This doctor's strategy seems to be a carrot-and-stick approach: be nice to it with orthotics, a cane, and minimizing walking (hence the permit), while simultaneously tormenting it with physical therapy and cortisone shots.

At least with the cane I look the part of the disabled person, though fortunately not the old man. I found a nice black cane, which I'm told makes me look "dapper". (So far I've worn a suit with it three times and a top hat once.) It also makes a huge difference in how people treat you. People surrender their seats on trains (it helps that I look like the dude with the cane in the icon on the window). People try extra hard not to run you over. Even TSA screeners treat you gingerly at security (though I get my own personal wanding every time I go through, thanks to the metal in my boot).

As amusing as this has been, it's getting old. I've found people are much happier with the barfight story than the real one. But I miss dancing, hiking, and standing up for longer than two minutes at a time.

It has given me an interesting perspective on mobility, and how much it impacts your life. It affects how you spend your time and who you spend it with. It's such a simple thing to be empowered by, something I'd taken for granted (and being in my 20s probably justly so). But lots of people live with these infirmities, and have them much worse than I do. I heard an interview on NPR about how people experiencing hearing loss tend to withdraw from their social circles, because they feel they can't share the same experiences as easily.

It's easy to fall into the trap of retreating into a disability and giving up. One grandfather did just that after his hip replacement; he decided it was far easier to sit in his chair and be lazy than work at trying to regain his strength. The other decided that having only a quarter of his heart working wasn't going to stop him, and poured himself into researching vitamins, drugs, and exercises, fighting for every last day; ultimately this probably gave him an extra year or two to live.

So while this gimpiness is annoying as all hell (how annoying is hell? pretty friggin' annoying), it is only temporary. I need to be more like the latter grandfather, doing everything I can think of to bring closer my triumphant return to the world of the standing.

Yeah, but you should see the other guy.

I'm spending the weekend on the couch under strict doctor's orders not to put any weight on my foot. Why, you ask?

It was a brutal bar fight with a man who insulted my family's honor. Next thing you know, we're brawling. He sprained my ankle with a kick from his steel-toed boots, but I at least broke his nose.

It was a shark attack off the California coast. I was swimming along minding my own business when a shark approached. I tried to swim away but it caught up and took a bite out of my foot. I struggled and managed to wrestle it away with a deft blow to its slippery snout, but I still needed twelve stitches.

It was a dance from hell with a woman who never figured out you're not supposed to waltz in stilettos. I'm not one to turn down a lady for a dance, even though she was obviously a beginner. Something possessed me to try a left waltz with her, and as we were changing directions, she stepped on my foot. Hard. With her heel.

Actually, it was much less exciting a story. Back in December when I went to NYC for New Year's to visit Cheng and Rose. Being New York, we walked everywhere, even places we could've taken the subway. Now, I've spent days walking all over cities like San Francisco, Bangkok, and Tokyo. So I didn't think this would be a big deal. But apparently I aggravated some old injury, because by the end I had a sharp pain in my ankle and was limping around. I was all set to brave the subways to the airport like a true New Yorker, but by then I was willing to pay whatever fare a cabbie could dream up.

So far, my doctors have determined that there's damage to the ligaments in my foot (bursitis and maybe tendinitis as well). So I started doing physical therapy. Once or twice a week I'd go in in the morning to see a series of therapists, who invariably spoke only Chinese. Which is just fine when you need to communicate something like "Ow!" but not so much for things like "It hurts here when I put weight on it" or "the voltage is too high, turn it down please!" (Yes, this apparently involves shock therapy too.)

The original plan was to have me back on my feet in time for Viennese Ball. And indeed, I was able to semi-gracefully dance the opening waltz, if not the pivot- and redowa-laden polka. Gradually I grew more adventurous, doing a little more swing and light polka. But I couldn't stay on my feet for more than a couple songs at a time.

Now it's been almost six months, and though I'm not in pain all the time, it still hurts more often than it...should after six months. I finally went to go see a podiatrist, who recommended cortisone. By this point, my doctor has decided this has been going on long enough too. So today I got a pleasant injection of lidocaine and cortisone. And this weekend I'm on the couch. With any luck I'll be back in action in time for Waltz Weekend and our trip to Crater Lake next month.

So beware of drunk guys in bars, sharks, stiletto-clad dancers, and... the streets of New York.

Who said Barack Obama was my friend?

So after seeing my coworker's massively stocked RSS reader, I decided to give the updated Google Reader a try. It's much better than their first prototype, which was trying so desperately to be AJAXy it was underwhelming and painful. But that was two years ago, and what with Web 2.0 and "feeds" being all the rage, I decided it'd be a great way to condense all the mindless clicking to check on people's blogs into one place. The beautiful thing about Reader is that you can just scan through dozens of posts (if they're short) with your scroll wheel in no time.

The sucky thing is that I've discovered that for every truly awesome story on Digg's front page, there's a whole bunch of useless Apple fanboy posts or choice articles about things like the pee shiver, some geek with a Firefox ATM card, and misleadingly labeled rant about why there are 2 pi in a circle. Since adding digg's feed to my Reader, I haven't yet been able to get below 100 unread articles. Like some demon Whac-a-Mole, it keeps sprouting stories I don't care about, burying the "important" feeds.

I discovered a bunch of my friends are now syndicating their blogs as Facebook notes, which is pretty convenient. I can just grab the master feed of friends' notes and add it to my Google Reader. Done. Since I don't try not to visit Facebook every day, it's a nice way to keep on top of their blogs. Each person posts, on average, once a day. Very easy.

Then I decided, in a fit of optimistic democratic engagement, to "support" Barack Obama on Facebook. Like many candidates, his campaign manager posted a profile there showing his softer side (how many people can claim a musical palate ranging from Bach to Miles Davis to the Fugees?). The idea is people can express their support for a candidate, which shows up in their friends' Facebook stalker feeds (which are not, incidentally, available as RSS), which encourages other people to support him/her, and it spreads like a virus. Which is all well and good for Obama--he's managed to almost beat Hillary at fundraising by getting a stunning 100,000 individual donors.

The problem, though, is Facebook decided he was my friend. And as such, I now get "his" notes all over my friends feed. At least twice a day now. They're not even interesting notes either--I know he's not really logging into Facebook and posting them, it's syndicated from some blog maintained by one of his campaign managers.

I like this guy. I want him to be President. Barring any dramatic revelations 'tween now and the primary he's got my vote. But I don't want to hear about the 35-year-old legal assistant from Houston, Texas who decided to vote for Obama. I don't care.

RSS could be the next frontier for spam. Just wait.

I'll be home for Christmas...I hope

The funny thing was, as I was packing to make my annual trip eastward, I had just been thinking about how lucky I'd been with air travel. How people were getting stranded by snowstorms in Detroit and missed the first day of winter quarter, or more recently how people were camping out in the Denver airport just a few days ago, but not me. I had even booked a flight from San Jose to Detroit with just a stop in Phoenix--cheaper than flying direct but I wouldn't have to change planes. MyForecast didn't predict any airport delays in any of the airports, so I went to bed the night before thinking I'd have smooth sailing. After all, Denver might just be asking for snow out there in the mountains, but when is there ever a snowstorm in Phoenix?

Dec 23, 9:30 AM. My first sign something was wrong was that the FAA's delays page showed a 90 minute delay out of Phoenix due to fog. Fog? WTF mate? But no matter, I thought; my flight doesn't leave till noon, so I'm sure this will clear up in time.

10:30 AM. I arrive at SJC the preordained 90 minutes before my flight to find a huge line at the America West counter, which I chalked up to being the day before Christmas Eve. I ran into Andy from Stanford, who it turns out is also on my flight to Phoenix, then connecting to Philly. The line doesn't move.

10:45 AM. After not getting anywhere, an America West agent comes out and asks everyone checking into our flight to come outside and check in with the skycap, because everyone inside is trying to rebook after the earlier flight to Phoenix got canceled.

11:00 AM. After not moving anywhere through the line outside, someone else informs us that our flight to Phoenix was being delayed, and would we please go back inside to see if we can reschedule our connections. There's no information on the flight board, and we have no idea what's going on.

11:30 AM. Again, not having really advanced far in the line, another agent comes out to tell us that our flight probably won't leave until 1:30 so it won't get to Phoenix until 4:45 [an hour and a half late], so anyone with connections before then a) probably won't make it, b) needs to rebook, and c) may well not get a flight out before Christmas because every single airline seat is apparently booked. Then she asked people who can still go to Phoenix to step to the front of the line and check in. Luckily, the plane to Phoenix was proceeding directly to Detroit, so it didn't matter how late it got there. Andy's still screwed, and I bid him a sympathetic 'good luck' and farewell. So I made my way to the front of the line.

11:40 AM. Now she announces that America West for some reason is changing planes and the Phoenix flight is not going to Detroit any more. Now I'm in the same boat as most everyone else in the terminal, who aren't happy. People are whipping out their laptops to check airline sites, and calling loved ones to tell them they're not going to make it. I finally make my way to the counter.

11:50 PM. My agent (who's in a considerably better mood than the last agent, all things considered) tries booking me on other airlines, and even considers shuttling me to Oakland to catch another flight. She even calls Southwest to see if they have open seats. Nearby, a stone-faced agent is telling someone he can't even fly standby on any of their flights because "the system can't handle it".

12:00 PM. The best she can do is let me onto the Phoenix flight, put me up in a hotel in Phoenix, then send me to Vegas the next night, then to Detroit, finally arriving at 6 AM Christmas morning. Sensing that this was my only hope of getting off the West Coast before Christmas, I agreed and thanked her for her help. Since I had more than 3 ounces of liquid as a Christmas gift for someone I checked my bag. She warned me that although my flight was planning to leave at 1:30, they'll "try" to leave earlier, so I should get to the gate as soon as possible. Sure enough, my boarding pass had that great mark of the beast SSSS: "selected for secondary security screening". I call my parents to let them know I won't be home that night after all.

12:20 PM. Making all haste to go directly to security without passing Go (or the food court, natch), I get up to the front of the line. Whereupon the TSA dude pulls me aside and asks me to wait for a screener, in line behind some other unfortunate chap (bless that "random" screening). Fearing that my flight might actually be thinking about taking off I try to plead for a little alacrity but to no avail. (Bam! a GRE word I still remember!)

1 PM. I rush to the gate, finding a long line of passengers, and...that my flight's been delayed till 3. Excellent. But I discover a text message from Dad: he found a flight for me from Phoenix the next morning on Southwest, amazingly enough.

2 PM. Andy shows up at the gate, with a similar new itinerary and hotel voucher. Meanwhile a crowd of increasingly irate would-be passengers begins to form for the next Phoenix flight, originally scheduled for 3:30.

3 PM. No plane. The gate staff has taken down any hint of when our flight might actually depart, signaling they have no clue either.

4 PM. We finally begin boarding our flight, only four hours late. At least she bumped me up to first class, figuring it was the least she could do. The guy next to me didn't pay for a first-class ticket either--he was supposed to fly out of SFO but his flight was oversold, so they shuttled him down to San Jose and told him he'd fly out at noon. If he'd only known...

4:15 PM. We leave the gate--with about 40 empty seats. Finally about to get underway, the captain explains, "I don't know what they told you," (always a great way to start..), but that our plane was headed to Phoenix that morning but diverted to Vegas because of the fog, then had to go to Phoenix to drop off the passengers when the fog lifted and that's why they were so late. Right.

7:15 PM. As we're taxiing to the gate, the pilot announces that this plane is continuing on to (surprise!) Detroit. That would've been nice to know too. I consider rushing to baggage claim and fighting my way back on the plane but decide that my parents probably wouldn't be too thrilled about picking me up in Detroit at 3 AM.

At least they put Andy, me, and a whole boatload of other America West refugees up in a nice hotel with free computers for Internet access and boarding pass printing, free breakfast, and free hourly shuttles to the airport. And a decent sushi restaurant across the street.

So I did make it back on Christmas Eve, about 2 PM--only 18 hours later than scheduled. And I was one of the lucky ones. Plenty of people either gave up in San Jose or were still waiting for flights in Phoenix, to say nothing of the poor saps still marooned in Denver. So here's what I learned:

• Don't trust America West or their parent USAir. Granted, this thing wasn't entirely their fault. But they still should've been more upfront on what was happening and been able to do faster rebooking. Once I found myself arriving early for a connection in Chicago and wandered over to a United counter--in the terminal, no less--and within five minutes was holding a rebooked ticket for a flight that left an hour earlier. America West has roughly six people serving all of San Jose, and rebooking with them is a painful process that can't be done over the phone and involves handwritten paper coupons and chanting mysterious voodoo hexes.
• Don't check your luggage and ask to fly standby. A whole bunch of people could've made it to Phoenix and even beyond, because the delays caused a ripple of no-shows throughout the country. Just because a flight looks full right now doesn't mean it will be three hours from now.
• Have someone try Southwest. Their flights don't show up in most ticket agents' systems cause they're just rebels that play by their own rules.
  

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.