April 30, 2002
Sunday Brunch
Got a call from my uncle in LA over the weekend.
"Hello Michael, I'm in San Diego to visit some friends. If you're not busy on Sunday let's get together for breakfast or brunch."
"Long time no see. Sorry for not getting in touch more often. I'm not doing anything so I'd love to get together. Where are you in San Diego?"
"I'm near the UCSD campus. My friend has a kid who's also a graduate student at UCSD. You can meet some new people."
Light bulb should've turned on here
"Um, yeah. Is American food okay? Chinese food in San Diego is no match for LA, I'm afraid. There are some nice places in La Jolla.
"Oh, that's fine. I'll come by and pick you up in 15 minutes.
15 minutes later...
"Sorry for the messy apartment. I wasn't really expecting guests.
"That's okay. I was a single student once, too, so I know how it goes. Let me make a call and we can pick up my friend along the way. It'll be a chance for you to meet someone new outside your department."
[Ed: The translation is a little awkward, the point being that Chinese pronouns are genderless, at least in the spoken word]
Klaxons should've been going off by now
"Um, sure. That'll be nice."
Not a clue
"Her name is Michelle, by the way."
Gotcha.
First time I've been fixed up, even though it wasn't really a hard sell. Thank goodness I managed to do a little research ahead of time. Picked out a California bistro-type place in downtown La Jolla. There was a bit of a wait during the lunch rush, but it gave us a chance to walk down to the Cove and we got a patio seat under a perfect San Diego day. The food was good, although a Cobb salad really should have avocado and blue cheese instead of cucumber and jack cheese.
Oh yeah, the girl. She's a PhD candidate in American Lit (late 19th century), after doing her undergrad work in Taiwan and getting a masters at UW Madison, which is pretty darn impressive. Smart, obviously, and cute enough. Seems like a nice person, but it's not as if you can tell anything more than that over lunch. Having the uncle there minimized the amount of awkward silences, although I'm not sure if conversation about the inner workings of the LED industry was preferable to awkward silence.
I'm not sure if we actually have anything in common, which may be a good thing, since anyone who has too much in common with me would probably be an antisocial freak. I figure I can at least get a cup of coffee out of it, if only to find out how she managed to get herself roped into this enterprise. If nothing else, it was a reminder that most people still meet mates through family and friends. The solitary swinging single is one of those postmodern figures that's more mythical than anything else. Remind me to pick up Bowling Alone one of these days. On the other hand, I'm not sure if I want to encourage the relatives too much, especially if I go back to Taiwan during the summer. If mom mobilizes her social network, this could get real ugly real fast.
April 28, 2002
Who Was Responsible for Elisabeth Shin?
Why Caltech is better than MIT: We don't light ourselves on fire.
Who can know whether she anticipated that there would one day be an audience for her reflections? They certainly do not have a ring of finality. But now they are being perused by a bevy of lawyers as a portal into the bedroom where she self-immolated.
Great Hair Disasters
- Any band from the 80s featured on Behind the Music
- Sugarbaker with a shaved head (at least until the razor burns heal)
- Dharma with a perm
- Barry Melrose with a mullet
April 27, 2002
Why you have to respect the Yankees
From Peter Gammons' column:
Several Yankee players assert the most surprising pitcher they've faced thus far has been Boston's Derek Lowe.
The same Derek Lowe went out and threw a no hitter today. Granted, the Devil Rays are about as far as you can get from the Yankees, but it counts just the same in the recordbooks.
April 26, 2002
Left the salmon filet
Left the salmon filet on the George Foreman grill far too long and turned it into sawdust. I really should've let it marinate a little longer, too. Hey, I was hungry.Speaking as a science-y geek,
Speaking as a science-y geek, I do love what the Baseball Prospectus folks have done with the game in creating metrics that actually explain why teams win. Work like this is why the A's are still a watchable team. On the other hand, callous statements like this about a kid who's worked his ass off his whole life is why casual fans hate the statheads:
Foster isn't really an organizational soldier, considering he has less than three years and barely more than a hundred games of pro experience, but he hasn't really been shunted into a situational-relief, although he's never started a game, either. He was effective at Myrtle Beach in 2000 and at Greenville in 2001. As long shots go, stranger candidates have had careers.
After the kids get the big contract, though, they're fair game, far as I'm concerned:
Parque is left-handed, and throws as hard as the power of positive thinking lets him. Rauch is likely to be pigeonholed as the lumbering gentle giant, while Parque is Thailand's answer to a Napoleonic complex, the little guy who can take on the world.
The median home price in
The median home price in California exceeded $300,000 last month. This includes chateaus in Tahoe, McMansions in the inland suburbs, a shack in the redwoods, and whatever habitable space one can scratch out in the Bay Area. Scary stuff. Not coincidentally, the affordability index keeps dropping, with more than 2/3 of the housing buyers earning over $70,000, and first-time buyers have a median income of $60,000 per year. So the average buyer of the average California house needs to be making $60-70K a year, and somehow save $30K for a reasonable down payment. It's all a matter or priorities, I guess. Other people like to complain about the awfully expensive the housing, the shallow culture, terrible traffic, etc., etc. in the Bay Area, but nobody I know seems to want to leave. Hopefully, the rest of the complainers can clear out soon.April 24, 2002
You must be a (sports) nut, and/or employed by ESPN, if...
...you spent the weekend watching the NFL Draft. A quintessentially American breed of sports fan, who ignores the playoffs on hardwood and ice, the baseball season sprinting out of the gate, the Champions League showdowns across the pond, and instead fusses over an event planted squarely in the middle of the NFL off-season. A meat market with payoffs that won't show for months, if not years. Maybe I'm just more complacent about the draft, since the Niners usually don't draft very high, so their fresh beef don't get the hype of the opening picks.
As for the ESPN employees, there's always Mel Kiper Jr., the Santa Claus of the NFL Draft, who apparently really does take it all very seriously. Then there's the writers and columnists, who hype the event, but with the in-joke of corporate synergy hanging in the background:
It wasn�t so much the 16 hours I spent on the couch watching the two-day event (you could put a coroner�s chalk outline around the cushion imprint). No, the worst part was when I caught myself calling my wife a "great value pick." We got into an argument, and before I knew it I was yelling things such as, "Why can�t you be more like Suzy Kolber?" and, "If you really loved me, you�d style your hair like Mel�s."
April 21, 2002
Boo Hoo
Who the hell gives a crap about the problems of overachieving white kids from a rich school district? Of course, all the featured kids got into their first choices (Harvard, Dartmouth, U.C. Berkley, respectively), thanks to supportive parents, private tutors, and exp(a/e)nsive extracurricular activities (yay National Science Bowl). There was a glimmer of perspective when one of them mentioned how arbitrary the SAT can be. Then she turned around and talked about how important the college education was to getting a good job and getting ahead in life and the glimmer faded in a hurry.
At least somebody is actually doing something relevant in this world. When I walk into a UC classroom and see 95%+ Asian/White faces, I think someone is getting screwed by the system, and it's not the kids covered by the CNN documentary. Actually, I'm surprised that the program didn't include an Asian family, especially since it was filmed in LA. Many of them came here to avoid the mind-numbingly competitive college entrance system in Asia in the first place, but it also meant that the parents are better prepared than most to play the game, should it be necessary. In the end, sometimes somebody just need to tell the parents to STFU.
April 20, 2002
This is the first time
This is the first time I've ever been tempted to buy anything from Abercrombie and Fitch, simply as a monument to stupidity. I suppose that it's brave to introduce "edgy" products without any focus groups or market research. On the other hand, it's scary how the A&F folks in good old Ohio couldn't see how this stuff might be a little bit offensive. I guess my PC sensor has been sharpened over the years in the Bay Area. They'd got into trouble before for showing too much skin in their catalogs, but most people don't mind seeing semi-naked hotties. These T-shirts just suck. I can't wait for their Dirty Niggers line, though.
April 18, 2002
April 15, 2002
Popped Weezer's Pinkerton into the
Poped Weezer's Pinkerton into the CD player on a lark.Both the blue and green albums are on the iPod, so I've been listening to them quite a bit, but the middle album is the forgotten stepchild. It's not hard to see why. It's not that the album was bad, per se, but it's almost deliberately unlistenable. There's no catchy hooks, the mix was aggressively discordant, all jangly cymbals and disjointed chords.It was artistically adventurous and all, but it didn't have any commercial appeal, and a Weezer is beholden to the commercial interests. Personally, I try not to be so pretentious as to demand artistic integrity out of musicians whose CDs I can buy from the BMG Music Club. Hey, at least they're not a one-hit wonder.April 14, 2002
Rules of Acquisition
I've been on a bit of an anime kick lately. Coincidentally, DVD Planet has a sale on their Pioneer titles, which was a chance to pick up some nice box sets. It's probably a bad habit left over from the Magic days, but I like to get the entire series of DVDs at once, even though it can be a big financial gamble. Once they put the series in a pretty box, the completist fetish becomes irrestible. Besides, only the crowd-pleasers get the box-set treatment anyway, so they're a pretty good bet.
Just finished Serial Experiments: Lain. Interesting bit of corporate synergy in that Pioneer used a British group from their own label as the opening theme. The main character could be the poster-waif for Big Eyes, Small Mouth. Right now, the whole thing seems deep and thought-provoking, reflective of the disturbing effects of technology on personal connections amongst friends, family, and society. Then there's the cynical voice which says that it's a pretentious exercise in convoluted story-telling using a handful of cels and lots of pan-and-scan shots. Talking about "deep" anime, the Neon Genesis Evangelion box just came. I have a feeling the cynical voice will be loud.
April 13, 2002
Save the Mammoth Orange!
Even a roadside shack in the middle of BFE isn't safe from the ravages of freeway expansion. Maybe they're even more vulnerable to the sprawl, since there's still space to pave out there. Compared to a place like South Pasadena, which has only been fighting the 710 extension for about thirty years or so. Who's going to fight for the Mammoth Orange?
April 12, 2002
The student co-op put in
The student co-op put in a self-serve bagel slicer and one of those conveyer-toasters. Before, they just had a conventional toaster-oven and some dull butter knives. Now this is the sort of entrepreneurial spirit and customer service that I admire. Besides, a toasted organic bagel and a bottle of fresh orange juice for under two bucks is about the cheapest decent lunch one can get on-campus.April 11, 2002
Home Networking
Yuck. Looks like that the Access Client Mode of a Linksys WAP11 will only talk to another WAP11 or some other 802.11b access point with an Atmel chipset. Of course, the AP/Router/Switch BEFW11S4 doesn't use the Atmel chipset, even though they're both Linksys products, so I'm SOL. If I want to put the DSL equipment in the wiring closet and go fully wireless, I'll have to get another piece of equipment to help the Smurf G3 get on. Either another WAP11, a Proxim USB Wireless Adapter, or a Skyline PCI card, all of which costs about the same. The WAP11 would be transparent to the host computer, but it's a clunky box. USB networking seems like a kludge to me. Sticking a radio antenna inside a computer case doesn't seem to bode well for its range. Although having the spare WAP11 does mean that I can get better coverage of the house, with the BEFW11S4 downstairs and the WAP11 upstairs, connected by the Cat5 run. Oh, and I can use an extra Orinoco Silver PC Card for the PB1400 to make it a roaming Internet terminal / streaming net-radio.
I know, the most practical thing is to quit grad school, get an electrician's license, and learn how to pull Cat5 through the walls. But wireless networking is just one of those sufficiently advanced technologies that appears totally magical. Although the glamour fades a bit when I have to shift the PowerBook back-and-forth just right to get a signal.
Preliminary opinion on the Mach3:
Preliminary opinion on the Mach3: Smooth
I don't mind the expensive (feed-a-Third-World-family-for-a-week expensive) blades since I only use a razor once every few days anyway. I use the electric for touch-ups in between. The only reason I even got the new razor was because I ran out of blades for my old one and I don't remember its name, which tells you how long I go between blades.
April 10, 2002
You are a fantasy sports junkie when...
Graham Hays: (5:32 PM ET ) I've got to go with Stiles in a fantasy WNBA league. Coming off September wrist surgery, she's poised for a great shooting year. Bird will eventually be an assist fiend, but remember, WNBA rookies get no offseason between college and the pros.
You might be a sports geek if you know who Stiles and Bird are, and why the fuck they're so damn special. The fact that female basketball players are more obscure than their male counterparts says something about society in general (society likes dunks?), but is irrelevant for your sports geek quotient (SGQ?).
Nothing makes me feel more
Nothing makes me feel more American than shopping at WalMart. It even contains its own McDonald's! Complete with Ronald McDonald sitting on a bench, right arm outstretched, waiting for you to sit down and be friends.April 05, 2002
License plate holder on the
License plate holder on the new Volvo convertible(?!) ahead in line at the drive-thru:
I'm not spoiled...
I just buy whatever I want