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.