Bar: did they beat me to it?

Think bars
Click on "think5". Try the "red berry" one. Read the ingredients list: vegetable powders, fruit concentrates, "soy lecithin" (still don't know what that is), trendy stuff like spirulina and green tea extract, and some olive oil and salt and stuff. Seems good to me. What's the catch? Maybe:
- all these powders. I assume they just dry the vegetables and then grind them up. If that's all there is to it, seems fine with me.
- the fruit concentrates. Think about apple juice from concentrate, which really doesn't have much of any nutritional value (that is to say, it doesn't have much whole apple, just peeled apple mashed up and concentrated). Is that what's going on here?
- the dreaded "natural flavors" (could be anything) at the bottom.

Still, it sounds like they are doing what I aimed to do with the Bar project (which I'll keep working on). I'd buy it. I wouldn't replace all my vegetables and fruit intake with it, but I'd eat it instead of some other bar. Most energy/protein/nutrition bars are either mostly grains, nutritional-sounding sugars (like "brown rice syrup" and "date extract"), or some weird "soy protein isolate" that tastes like hell and is probably not even healthy. So I'd go for a mostly-fruit-and-vegetables bar.

Vonnegut quotes, part 2985073

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

A tricky little catch for hipsters, eh? If your character is all ironic, look out! While you're running around in fields pretending to be a hippie, maybe you are becoming one. Or say you dress all slick and talk about businesses all the time, maybe you're on your way to tooldom. Or if you talk about John Deere and hot dogs and the good ol' US of A... just sayin'.

There's a good side of this, too: if you pretend to be something good, you will become it. Say you want to be a really cool guy. Act like you are one. If you really are, then you're just being yourself; if not, you will become one soon enough. Or if you want to be an outdoorsman, or a scientist, or an artsy sort of person, or a DJ, or whatever. You can be whatever you want, and it's really easy: just pretend to be it. That's neat.

In other news, speaking of being a DJ, I just played my last WRCT show today. How sad! I like talking, and especially talking to potentially hundreds of people, and especially talking AND forcing my musical choices on potentially hundreds of people.

I tried to make a "best of CMU 2004-2008" playlist, but I don't know how well it turned out. So I promised to make a "best bands that I've heard as my music collection grew to ten times its size over these four years", a "top N" best songs/albums/whatever. I guess albums, I should go with albums. It'll be up in some number of days, maybe a few days, that's all I can promise right now. (life is so hard for us!)

(that's sarcasm. life is easy.)

How to travel, how to travel, how to travel...

I guess what I want is experience. Here's my internal debate:

If you're going somewhere, should you do a lot of research, plan your trip out day by day, book your places beforehand? I guess so, right? If not, you'll likely show up and find nowhere left to stay, and know nothing about the place. Still, there's something unsatisfying about that answer, though. It seems so forced. Seems like you'll end up in the same old tourist traps, while some other dude is just rummaging his way around and doing crazy cool things.

But what things? How? Odds are that dude will just get lost or spend some nights sleeping out in a field or something. Lame. Yeah, plan it all out. Just because you planned out where you'll be each day doesn't make the trip any less "real."

But it does, it's all fake fake fake fake. It's so rich-white-person.

Shut up! This whole conversation is rich-white-person! The idea of traveling for fun is rich-white-person! Or at least stuffwhitepeoplelike.com . Really. Quit your existential mumblings and have a good trip. Whatever way that means. Jesus Christ, you can't even take a vacation without having a mental meltdown.

Yeah, but there's no prestige in a holiday spent kicking back and relaxing. If you're going to travel, you have to travel right.

Wait, are we even arguing anymore? What's the problem here?

I'm not sure. Thank you all for reading this post! I'm so tired, I don't even know what I mean at all anymore! What the shit!

Obama actually said...

Candidates make speeches for WWE Raw

He ACTUALLY SAID "Do you smell what Barack is cooking?" ! Hahahahahahahahaha! Granted, both speeches looked pretty cheesy on paper. And probably were cheesy in reality. But I can't believe he actually said "Do you smell what Barack is cooking"!

Well, he's got my vote right there.

One minor annoyance

I can't seem to find my mouse. I have no idea where it could have gone. This is a most intriguing mystery! Did anyone randomly borrow it this weekend out of my room? Grubb, did you pee on it?

Thank you for everything, etc. etc. etc.

So when I said last weekend was the best weekend ever, I was lying, because THIS weekend was the best weekend ever. Thanks to my old SnS friends who came in from out of town; thanks to Dan for coming in from Cleveland; thanks to CMU for giving us time off to have a carnival.

Thanks to the hundreds of you who cheered and laughed as NPP opened for Human Giant, and overpowering the drunk people who yelled mean things at us. Thanks to Gerrit and Will for being in the show; thanks to the rest of the Players for being flexible with everything. Thanks to Aaron for heroically feeding 50 people a Seder dinner without as much as a dishwasher or garbage disposal.

The list goes on and on, but right now I'm going to Waffle House with Gerrit, Will, Grubb, and Mike Yin. Thanks to you guys too!

Thanks to Ram for the sermon from afar. Thank you for everything; I have no complaints whatsoever. If you say something enough, it becomes true.

Argmax

There's a really great function that sneaks in when you start learning about AI. It's called "argmax" and they throw it in there without even really explaining it as if it were entirely self-explanatory. It means "the value of the variable that makes the expression maximum." So, for example: (and sorry about lack of typesetting)

argmax_x -(x-3)² = 3

because the way to maximize -(x-3)² is by putting in 3 for x. If you take the "max" instead, it'd be 0:

max -(x-3)² = 0

because any negative squared thing is never going to get bigger than 0.

But the great thing about argmax is that you can use it in contexts that are not quite so mathy. If p is a product:

argmax_p price(p)

means "the price of the most expensive product." But even better, you can talk about it even when you have no freakin' clue how to evaluate it. Let c be a career among all the possible careers you could take:

argmax_c happiness(your life, your family, your friends, your belongings, c)

and that represents the career that will make you the happiest, given everything else. Okay, so what's this all leading up to? If you have a group of people and they want to do a thing, but they want to do different things, you should do the thing that makes the most people the happiest. If every person i assigned an enjoyment value e_ij for each thing j that he/she wanted to do, then just add up the enjoyment values and take the argmax.

argmax_j sum_i e_ij

This is exactly Beej's "voting game." If there are two choices of things to do, A and B, and there are three people, p1, p2, and p3, and the votes go like this:
      A    B
p1  3    4
p2  5    1
p3  2    4
you add this all up, and thing A gets 10 points and thing B gets 9 points, so you should do thing A. Even though p1 and p3 would rather do thing B, p2 REALLY wants thing A, so thing A is the thing to do.

This is a great algorithm! It leads to maximal total enjoyment, right? So that's cool. p1 and p3 can't complain, because if they had really wanted to do thing 2, they could have given it a higher score. If they really didn't want to do thing 1, they could have given it fewer points.

But there seems to be one small flaw: p1 and p3 might be a little irritated at this; after all, they're the majority! They might perceive p2 as "pushy." And they'll feel like p2 "owes" them something; they're caving to him this time. Maybe next time p2 should let p1 and p3 do what they want, even if p2 wins the voting game again.

HOW TO SOLVE THIS?
One solution: everyone can only use a total of 10 points per game. When someone wins, everyone else gets "bonus" points equal to what they voted but lost. So in the example above, p1 gets 7 and p3 gets 6 (p2 gets 0). This represents what p2 "owes" them for winning. They p1 and p3 are sad now, but will be more likely to be happy in the future.

This is not great because that's a lot of remembering. But I feel like, over time, everyone will be optimally happy.

ANOTHER OPTION:
p2 wins and everyone else chill the fuck out!

EITHER WAY:
play the voting game, deal with the results, and don't harbor resentment about it.

THIS MEANS:
Beej, I'm officially a convert (although maybe we should allow values up to 10 to allow more variation. Or maybe it's fine as is).

I need to read articles like this more often

The Rebel Sell
Maybe it's because I just drank some (Starbucks brand) coffee, but as I'm reading this article, I keep going "Yeah! Right on!" It's long, but worth the read. It's also 6 years old, I guess, but still rings pretty true to me.

There are evils in the world brought on by big corporations, and we're in a world driven by consumption, sure. But buying a lot of things won't stop it. Even if you're buying underground music CD's, clothes from REI, or Guatemalan handcrafts. It's the same "keeping up with the Joneses" in a 2008 form.

And my holding this opinion makes me more counter-cultural, because I'm being so much more counter-cultural than you, I'm being counter-counter-cultural. Booyah.

Thank you for everything, etc. etc.

This weekend has been fantastic.

Friday night we had our improv show with Irony City. It may have been the caffeine, but I think it couldn't have gone over better. We were really darn funny for our set, and I kept feeling like I was walking this line of "oh my god this show is great don't fuck up" and then I DIDN'T, and neither did anyone else, which is weird because that's not a feeling you want to have while you're improvising, you want to have the feeling of "it's okay, I can do whatever", but somehow it worked out. Then Irony City was really funny, as always. I really like their troupe, they all have strong points, especially Greg and Atom, who are geniuses. And our combo time was the best of both worlds.

Thank you if you came to our show. You made it the best. Improv is so much more fun when there are 45 people (literally) cheering you on. Good show all around.

Then we had our British party, and it was so fun too! Thanks Greg for inspiration and a meat pie, thanks to all of you who came just for being there. I can't say what made it such a great atmosphere, but just every conversation I was in, I kept thinking "I care a lot about this person and I'm glad to be hanging out with him/her."
Plus, drinking lots of Pimm's and lemonade and Brandies Alexander is always a classy and fun thing to do.

Saturday night too, going to Mad Mex with Sarah, Beej, Daniel, and Hannah, because why not? It was great! Again, a small group of close friends is about the best thing one can ask for. And $5 good food never hurts.

Today I sat at the fence all day. Uneventful, but somewhat enjoyable nonetheless.

And somewhere in this weekend, I finished the 11-411 project, about question answering for wikipedia articles, and I got that little rush of excitement from finishing a program and I remembered that I LIKE what I do, and also that I'm not terrible at it. I'm the luckiest guy in the universe.

And then this is really kind of funny: bash.org
and there's one for CMU, which is a little eerie because I know some of these people.

This blog is becoming more and more like a digg account every day

Or a digg page or whatever you call it, one of those pages where you just list links that you like. But here is a link that I like:
Michael Pollan explains it all
(warning: long article. You don't have to read it all, just read what you want.)

If someone said to me "lay out your beliefs on food", I would probably just link to this guy, because he says a lot of things that I agree with and he presents them in a well-formulated argument, which is something that I haven't done since 12th grade English class. (We scientists lose our ability to write, you humanitarians lose your ability to do math. Not that that's a good thing.)

Also he's so damn reasonable, which is something I really value in an arguer. I'm glad he never strays into saying "meat is murder" or "you people buying your frozen dinners are wrong" or "McDonald's is killing the environment" or whatever because that would alienate his opponents, and we won't get anything done if we can't have a reasonable conversation.

Bwa-hahahaha

This merited a news story? Also, awesome.

Shit, philosophy time again

Okay, a quote that's rattling around my brain:
"If you're only happy based on your life circumstances, you're not really happy at all."
or,
"If the only things that make you happy are temporary and fleeting (your work, your possessions, even your friends), your happiness is really only temporary and fleeting."
or,
"If you're only happy when things are going well, you're doing it wrong."
or something to that effect.
Is that something real that a super-enlightened Buddhist guy (or other happy person) has said or would say? Or am I making this up?

My Ecuadorian Food Diary

Thought you might enjoy this. I mean, maybe not, whatever. In a sense, it's sort of like a toothbrushing diary (4/8/08: used Colgate Total, spearmint flavor. 4/9/08: Colgate Total spearmint and floss. 4/10/08: Aquafresh!) but in another sense, it's neat, because I ate a lot of cool fruits.

Food in Ecuador, and there was a lot of it, recounted with more details than you care about, but missing some foods that I would like to have remembered, and also missing guinea pigs, because we did not eat them

Saturday (3/8/08 if you're counting)
Lunch/dinner in Quito:
Crispy roasted corn (some salty, some sweet; our guide said they called them "dogshit")
empanadas with a pink spicy sauce
lomo fritado (pork)
hominy (I think)
potato (or maybe plantain) patties
avocado
salsa-type stuff
cooked fig in syrup with some bland cheese
red wine
naranjilla and tomate de arbol fruits and their juices
Snack on the way to Muisne: Chifles (plantain chips, in a bag, from a gas station)

Sunday 3/9
Breakfast:
Arepas
Papaya
Pineapple (which was white, not yellow at all, and not super-sweet, but pretty good)
Lunch:
Rice, beans
Fried mahi mahi nuggets
Carrot/cucumber/lettuce salad
Fried plantains
Somewhere out on a trail: Guava (or something. Andres insisted it was different from guayaba, which we call guava. Some sleuthing only reveals that what we ate may be this? But it came in a long pod.)
Dinner:
Rice
Chicken
Cauliflower and carrots salad
Some donutty things with chocolate sauce

Monday 3/10
Breakfast/walking through jungle:
Fresh coconuts and coconut water (which is really good)
Pineapple
Cherimoya (also awesome, tastes like yogurt)
Rice
Shrimp
Instant coffee (ignorant I thought that they grew and drank a lot of coffee in Ecuador. Not so! And the coffee they drink is all instant, or boiled down hardcore so you have to dilute it to drink it.)
Guanabana (aka Soursop, and totally different from Guava or Guayaba.)
Lunch:
Rice
Beef stew with peppers
Plantain pancakes with chocolate
Lettuce leaves
Dinner: I forgot

Tuesday 3/11: No idea! Sick all day!

Wednesday 3/12: Sick most of the day! Had some shrimp and a cassava thing for dinner.

Thursday 3/13:
Breakfast:
Some kind of very salty omelet
Other pancakey thing
Lunch (at a lady's house in Muisne):
Soup with beef, cassava, etc. in broth
Fish in coconut lime sauce (awesome)
Rice
Dinner: forgot

Friday 3/14:
Breakfast:
Some kind of banana pancakes
Maracuya (passion fruit) juice
Lunch: Ceviche with shrimp, lime, tomato, hot peppers, some herb. Possibly the best thing I ate the whole trip.
Rice
Plantain chips
Dinner (on beach):
Fried fish
Rice, beans
Plantain patties
Coke
Sometime throughout the evening:
A few caipirinhas. (apparently popular in Ecuador as well as Brazil.)

Saturday 3/15: don't really remember.

Sunday 3/16: a huge breakfast with no rice or bananas in sight.

Ads for cake mix in Argentina

like this one are much better than ads for cake mix here. (plus I'll buy anything if it's got an ad by AiH. Oh wait, not a Sprint phone.)

A few things, no theme, unlike my radio show

1. If you're not aware, my radio show is on Mondays 2-4pm on WRCT 88.3fm (or at wrct.org). I call it "special topics in modern pop music" because I want to try to educate listeners a little bit about what I know about pop music and its various sub- or related genres. My former show was called "I will tell you the names of the songs that I play". I'm big on the college radio station as music education, in addition to just fun music, because you can get out your ipod and play just fun music. (or Japanese noise rock, or whatever) But it's up to us flesh-and-blood DJs on a real-life radio to try to expose you to the newest and best.

This week I played acousticky folky singer-songwriter stuff. (I didn't like it. But other people might.) I played about 3 songs, then got on the air and said what I thought about them and who they were. (might have been Sufjan Stevens, Cat Power, or something) A guy called in and said he really appreciated how I told the listeners who was playing and made some kind of connection to the music, because most DJs just play music for an hour. I felt like my four years as a WRCT DJ were finally validated. It was really nice. Thanks, guy!

2. Speaking of music, Vampire Weekend is actually great. Sometimes I'll be listening to instrumental electronic stuff or grandiose post-rocky soundscapes or whatever, and I'll really just want something goddamn catchy and happy!

3. No longer speaking of music, this weekend was even better. Thank you, weekends!

4. Hate to end on a philosophical note, but I'm wondering (after going to Ecuador, although I was wondering before going to Ecuador too) what one person's responsibility is in this world.

For example, here are some responsibilities:
- Don't be a jerk. This is the most basic thing you can do: not make the world a WORSE place. Don't kill, hurt, steal, cheat, etc. But if this is all you accomplish, it by no means makes you a good person at all.
- Love other people. That's important.
- Work. Do what you're good at, and do it well. I think this is a requirement; think of the world as a commune. If you don't produce anything, you're hurting the world, because you take up things.
- Be happy. I'm pretty sure this is a responsibility, as well as a right.
- Help others, in the "service" sense. I'm not so sure about this. St. Ignatius High School would say "definitely yes." The world at large would say "meh, whatever." I mean, should I spend one day a month building a house or something? Donate 10% of my income to charity? Does that really help the world? Should I do that for my own good? Or is this just somewhat-Christian-upbringing guilt speaking?

THIS.

"You're curious and smart and bored, and all you see is the choice between working hard and slacking off."

Tack this guy on to my list of "travel heroes"

Said list currently consists of "Where the hell is" Matt. But read this too:
London to Sydney by public transportation
What a champ.

Who cares a lot?

(That's the title of a Faith No More greatest hits album, apparently.)

I don't!

This semester has seen me transition from college-style work to grad school-style work. I'm not in five classes with weekly assignments; I'm in two classes with projects. And I'm working on this research project on my own, and I'm miserable. I don't have class five days a week; I'm in class for six hours a week. Reading journal or conference articles is impossible! Or, it's possible, but it takes me so goddamn long that I get really sick of it by about page 3. I can't concentrate when I work; I think every hour is about 15 minutes of work and 45 minutes of checking email, reading other websites, getting a snack, reading comics, blogging (hi!), etc.

Am I dumb? Probably not. I'm in the top n% of the class here, honors, etc.

Am I lazy? Maybe. I don't think I work more hours than anyone else. I probably work a lot fewer hours. But I complain more.

Do I have bad work habits? I guess, if that procrastination ratio is any indicator. I'm working at home a lot, and it's driving me nuts. I feel like I'm sitting in a cave and I never see other humans.

Do I really just want to be done with school? YES. I want it to be summer. (Or, not quite, because then a lot of people leave my life, some of them forever, and that's always sad. I want it to be like the week after finals, when everyone's still around, forever. Well, you can't always get what you want.) The point is, I'm really done with all this grad school-style stuff. I don't care about natural language processing and journals and conferences and semantic parsing. It's still all greek to me anyway.

Grad school must be TERRIBLE if you're not into it, and I feel like I'm half in grad school, and I'm really not into it. I'm sorry. I hope that's all it is... I hope I'm not just overall lazy.

Will I be miserable when I get a real job and have to work all the time, and can't look forward to summer? I hope not. Man, I really hope not. I've not had tons of fun at any of my summer internships, and I'm certainly not having fun (work-wise) now, so I don't know why I expect it to be any better, but I really hope it is.

I'm, uh, alive...

but more than half of my blood still resides in Ecuador, and I didn't even wake up in a back alley missing a kidney! I'm talking about mosquitoes OW IT ITCHES OW OW OW.

But yeah. I'm back home safe. I will not post a full post now because that will take a while. I will say this: I tried to keep up with OMPW by watching August Rush on the plane. Unfortunately, it sucked a butt. I really tried to stick it out through some wonderfully corny lines and a black kid written by white people, but then this kid started wandering dazed through New York City and conducting a symphony because oh my god all the sounds of the city make the most beaUUUtiful music, and oh please.

OMPW

Right on the heels of OLPC and me worrying about work too much, I propose One Movie Per Week. That is, I plan to watch at least one movie per week. I mean movies that I want to watch. Right now the list looks like this:
Blade Runner
Dr. Strangelove
Amelie
but I'm going to start adding to it all the time. I'm retroactively declaring No Country for Old Men as the first OMPW.

How will this work? Once a week, I'll decide I want to watch a movie. I'll send out an email or a text message to invite everyone on the OMPW list. Then, at the time I've chosen, I'll watch the movie I've chosen, whether or not anyone shows up. The primary purpose for this is to give me a bit of a movie education, as I am woefully behind, but hey, if I'm watching a movie, why not do it with friends, right?

So if you want to be on the OMPW list, let me know! The following stipulations apply:
1. You have no rights as a member of the OMPW list. The movie that I have chosen will happen at the time I have chosen. You only have the choice whether to attend or not.
2. You have no responsibilities as a member of the OMPW list. I won't say you're lame for having to do homework or whatever. I won't expect you to show up. But I'll be happy if you do!

Happy Leap Day!

On this strange day, why not join us all in a big WTF, mates?

Why not celebrate with a No Parking Players + Off the Top improv show? (UC Danforth, 9pm, be there be there be there for serious, chumps.)

Or try this trippy Get Fuzzy cartoon. I like when he gets really bizarre.

Or go watch "No Country For Old Men" and tell me what the ending meant so I will stop being bothered by it.
(SPOILER ALERT maybe. I'm not going to talk details, but I will talk vaguely about the ending, so if you're going to see it, maybe you shouldn't read this)
There were some really super-cool scenes. Like the one where Anton Chigurh (the psycho killer) flips a coin for that guy's life in the gas station. Awesome awesome scene. And where Llewellyn Moss (the cowboy "good guy") wakes up in Mexico to a mariachi band, and where Chigurh kills the executive boss guy while the accountant watches, scared stiff. (PS. Chigurh's pressurized cattle gun: TERRIFYING.) The movie as a whole, though, left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I'm not going to say I like my movies wrapped up nicely with a bow, Hollywood-style. I will say, though, fuck Waiting for Godot.

Some kid was walking out of McConomy and said something like "I like my comedies black and my dramas existential" or something, which made me want to reply with a super super great Dismemberment Plan quote, "I like my coffee black and my parole denied", which is sort of my overall sentiment about the whole "life is terrifying and it sucks a lot, and then it keeps sucking, but never in a grand way, always just sort of blah" style of literature/film. There are awesome bits! Absolutely killer! But when you put them all together, you get something that's sort of blah. I guess that's the idea. But when you are making ART for the purpose of proving that things are sort of blah, why are you making art in the first place? You can find things that are blah all around you. Hey, my shoe's untied.

EMAIL PROTOCOL for humans!

This is not about SMTP or POP or IMAP or STFU. This is about how I propose people should deal with emails:

- Your inbox is your to-do list. Everything that comes in should be viewed as a task that needs to be completed.
- A task is completed if:
- it doesn't require a response (ex: a message that just says "thanks" or a mass mailing)
- you have responded to it, and you know that you're responding to the right person
- Otherwise, the task is not completed, and it must fester in your inbox like a thorn in your side until you have dealt with it!
- Once a task is completed, it should be archived, or moved to a "trash" folder. (not deleted.)
- Your inbox should not be larger than, say, 30 emails. If there are more than about 30, you will lose track of some of them.
- Every day, you should read over your inbox and make sure that you're not holding anyone else up by not replying to these emails.

Even more music

Stuff white people like

This is funny/scary/funny/scary/funny/scary. Like #72. Right on. Ha ha. And #64. Hmm, guess I do that too. And then I got to #62. Shit!

Goddammit now I had to read the whole goddamn thing, and who are you out there blogging my life?!

Whatever. Fuck you. I'm not sorry. I'm going to get a nice big old suburban house and I'll drive my Prius to farmers markets and tea shoppes. I'll travel to Thailand just to one-up you and I'll come back with a story about how it totally changed my life and how I'm "spiritual" but not "religious" and buy a goddamn stand mixer! And drink microbrews while watching NOTHING on my NOT TV. Then I'll have my midlife crisis and go to culinary school.

Tomorrow's post: #76 Fantasies of becoming a chef.

Oh, sorry, I got distracted. I meant to also post this, because right on, I love "I Got a Man" by Positive K. Tally Hall fans, note #8.

More music: bein' a dj in more than one sense of the word

I kinda want to get into more aspects of pop/electronic music. I want to learn to do some stuff with mixing songs. I don't know what I mean by that. I know there are a lot of types of messing with music, as it were: you can be a live DJ for a party, or you can do scratching and like dueling-DJ stuff, or you can remix other songs, or you can be a little more hardcore-electronic and make something with a lot of bloops and bleeps. I don't think any of those are what I want to do (although I wouldn't mind learning them), but I'm not sure what I do want to do. But here are some things I like:

Girl Talk
The Avalanches
The album "DJ Kicks" by Hot Chip (or I guess I should say, by various artists, curated by Hot Chip)

I don't particularly like mashups for mashups' sake, although they can be neat too, I've heard a few good ones. I like thinking about what songs would go well together, and I like fading one song out and fading one song in real smooth-like. So if you know things about these and can point me in the right direction, or give me a name for what it is I like to do, or point me to some (free) software, I'd be interested in that.

Art and music

Okay, first, a question that I'm sure I (and many others) have asked before, and gotten a pretty good answer to, but I don't remember it. Why don't artists make anything nice anymore? (I'm not bashing modern art) Like Renaissance art, or Dutch-old-masters style, or anything that portrays actual things somewhat realistically. Why does "modern art" always mean "something abstract"? Note that I'm not bashing modern art, but what about the great artists who want to paint a nice picture of people or a landscape or something? (Hey I really like modern art, no seriously, I like it, I'm not bashing it.)

Second, I was poking through some WRCT playlists, and I found this from last Friday, which includes a song from this album, on which my awesome uncle played bass. So his band is officially somewhat famous. Neat!

Oh no oh no the political process is terrible

I mean, whatever. So we only get a choice between two candidates, or three this year, which is nice. And the debates are a sham, fine. I heard Beej and Scott Baumgardner talking about this, which is true: candidates only rehash like three points, and people all think what the candidates say. "Hillary has experience." "Obama wants change." Okay, so I'm going to vote for Obama because I want change. But it would be nice if I had a nice list of the issues and how they stand, so I could have a good reason to vote for a candidate instead of that candidate's sound bytes. Could someone bring up net neutrality or waterboarding? Then I'd get into it.

Also, here's where I show how I can see both sides of issues:
- Barack, shut up about how you voted against the war! Hell, I don't even know if I would have voted for the war or not if I'd been in the Senate at that time, based on the intelligence we had and my former political beliefs. It's true that I appreciate that a candidate has foresight and that, had he been president, we might not be mired in this mess. But it seems like he's basing a campaign on one ballot he happened to get right.
- New York Times, shut up about McCain. Now, I want a Dem to win as much as the next guy, but geez oh man, not because of sensationalistic "he had an affair!" stories. I am not going to try to say something clever about how remember that time Bill Clinton and etc. because that joke is too obvious but instead I will say SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.

Proof and Clones

Man, Proof was fun! I'm glad I was in it. The cast is a fun group, I mean, the tech staff is fun too. I got to hang out with family and friends this weekend, and everyone liked the show. What more can you ask for?

Also, while I'm on the subject of food, I'm going to vote that this is "probably not okay at all." Not being sarcastic; I really think it's probably not okay. I mean, we don't know what we're doing when it comes to cloning and its long-term effects, right? And if they try to narrow the herd down to the tastiest cows, that decreases genetic diversity, which is probably a bad thing.

Also, fuck college apps (this post is less important than my previous post)

I'm so glad they're over, and that I never have to fill out an application proving myself AS A PERSON again. It's messed with my mind enough. Sometimes I'll grumble about the job search process, and how they don't care if you're a good guy or not as long as you have a nice few letters on your resume (like CMU BS CS) and can reverse a linked list in under a minute. But it's a hell of a lot better than the college app process, which still messes with my mind, because it puts up a metric to judge yourself (not just your scholastic abilities) against.

I think. I don't know. Sometimes I go back and forth, and I rationalize that I DO want to be the kind of person that the ideal college app would like, a well-rounded involved leader blah blah, but sometimes I say it's (to quote The Lounge) "so fucked" because, to use Java metaphors, Person does not implement Comparable, nor should there be any Comparator that takes two Persons as arguments.

But please, ignore this whine and look at the next post about NET NEUTRALITY. Especially if you are a lawmaker.

Oh my god net neutrality.

If you don't know what net neutrality is, click the link or keep reading. In my understanding of net neutrality, the idea is that we'd have some sort of law to prevent, say, the ISP's from blocking or restricting traffic to certain sites.

That's a good idea, right? Of course it's a good idea! The fact that we're even debating whether or not it's a good idea is terrifying!

Let me phrase this like a congressional bill, because maybe Gerrit will get a kick out of it.

WHEREAS the internet is one of the best things the world has going for it right now (see as evidence Wikipedia and OLPC and CiteSeer and, well, Google),

and whereas If we allow Comcast and Verizon and etc. to decide which websites are blocked or whatever, the Internet will become the next TV or radio,

and whereas Clearchannel sucks a lot,

Therefore be it resolved that net neutrality is a good thing, goddamn it.

Anyway, there's a bill going through the house or senate, I dunno, and I don't know a damn thing about governments besides TELL YOUR CONGRESSPERSON TO SUPPORT THIS BILL BECAUSE IT SUPPORTS NET NEUTRALITY.

Seriously. There are only a few things I feel really strongly about (like waterboarding, and bicycling, and eating well (hey, two of those three are fun things, and the third sounds like it should be a fun thing, but it is really USA-legal torture!)) but this is one of them.

DAMMIT GO CLICK ON THAT LINK.

Rock Band.

So I go over to Aaron and Greg's house to play some video games because Mike Yin's in town. I remember they have this new Rock Band thing that all the kids are talking about. Hey guys, I say, you want to play Rock Band? Sure. So they bring out:
An XBox control
A microphone
Two guitars
A drum set (complete with homemade bass drum pedal)
...
A disco ball
A strobe light
A FOG MACHINE.

I'm entirely* sold on the game. {

• *by "entirely" I mean like 90%, because the strength of this game really depends on the songs- it's a lot more fun if you have a good song. And now I know they're never going to make a "21st-Century-Indie-Pop-Hero (Plus Some 90's)*" (with accordion so you can play along with Beirut, the Decemberists, and They Might Be Giants), and given that, they've made a pretty decent song list! See:
• "Go with the Flow" by Queens of the Stone Age
• "Suffragette City" by David Bowie
• "Roam" by the B-52's
• "Maps" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs
• and freakin' "Electric Version" by the New Pornographers! {
• why won't they? You can imagine them releasing the API (or whatever you'd call it) for making a song, and people making their own songs and playing them on Rock Band. Why not?
• }
  

}
(I guess I want code blocks in my blog posts. Who knew?)

Also, apparently you can buy a fog machine, strobe light, and disco ball as a Rock Band accessory. When Aaron and Greg heard about this, they reportedly said, screw that, we already own a fog machine, strobe light, and disco ball. --> Aaron and Greg are heroes.

Food, Bar, and this post is totally not about programming

I just noticed this book on Amazon. I'm intrigued. For those of you too lazy to click on the link, this guy made a nice little sound bite: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." He means to say that the modern Western/American diet (processed food, white flour, red meat, etc.) is bad for us and that people have come to believe in "nutritionism" (looking for vitamins and minerals; basically, looking at numbers too much). We've become focused on vitamin C, iron, and protein instead of bananas and spinach. And we Americans are so fat and unhealthy and blah blah. The cure? Don't eat so many preprocessed foods. Eat mostly plants. Buy higher quality food, eat less of it, care about your food instead of just shoveling it down.

I agree! I'm also not going to buy his book because it's self-defeating: in preaching simplicity, he's simplified his message to the point where you don't need to read the book. I think. But the point is, I agree with this guy.

Another side topic: Beej was talking about this ONQI thing, aka the "100 point nutritional scale" that I blogged about before. (a recap: the idea is, instead of (or maybe in addition to) the current nutrition label, we'd just have one with one number, 1-100, to tell you how healthy something is.) Pros: if it's implemented well, people might realize that all the processed stuff they're eating is unhealthy. Cons: if it's not implemented well, people might think that all the processed stuff they're eating is healthy.

See, what Michael Pollan is talking about (click on that link and read the article, he sounds like a champ) is the same thing I've heard from a lot of other people, and it makes sense. Use less pesticides, stop making everything out of corn and soybeans, don't eat mass-produced meat, don't eat all these added sugars and chemical nonsense, etc. Oh, and stop reading those numbers! We've grown accustomed to this idea of counting our food: counting calories, counting fat, counting protein, etc. Back in the 90's it was "fat is bad." Now it's "fat is fine, carbs are bad, protein is good." Oh, and fiber is good too. So just eat GoLean cereal, why don't you? Only 140 calories, 10g fiber, 13g protein! Who needs produce? After all, you won't get any protein in your watercress or pomegranates!

I guess what I'm trying to say is: if nutrition were just as easy as counting numbers, why couldn't you just eat every day a box of GoLean and a multivitamin and be totally healthy?

There are a lot of possible answers, including:

• We haven't figured out all the vitamins and minerals that you need. There may be hundreds of different nutrients you need, and we're not going to be able to synthesize them all. So a multivitamin, tempting as all those "100% RDA"s may be, won't do it all.
• Artificially produced vitamins aren't absorbed as well as those in food. NOTA BENE: I just made that up, I have no idea if it's true. I'm hypothesizing.
• Nutrition is really just magic! I don't know why eating spinach works and eating vitamins doesn't, but that's the way it is!
  

Anyway, if you want to eat healthy, eating food, not too much, and mostly plants sounds like a good way to go.

---

But is there more to food than healthiness?

What if you don't want to eat healthy? Well, dammit, you should! But sometimes you don't. That's cool too. Our bodies are pretty miraculously flexible, and I feel like they can deal with a lot of crappy food. Just maybe not as much as the average American puts into them. Whatever. Sometimes it's not all about health. Let's consider some ways food can be good. It can be:

• Healthy
• Tasty
• Convenient
• Cheap

And I'm proposing that you can pretty easily get all but one. For example: all but healthy? Fast food. All but convenient? Cook your own! Home-cooked food can easily be healthy, tasty, and cheap. All but cheap? Well, that's a little trickier, but there's a lot of takeout places that you can get good stuff. Even Evgefstos in the UC is pretty good at this.

But all but tasty? That's the question I aimed to tackle. See, I like Clif bars. And any other "energy bar"- I like food that's convenient, tasty, and cheap. And I can sometimes convince myself that it's healthy. (look at all that fiber and protein!) But look at the ingredients list sometime. Disregard the "made with organic oats and soybeans" badge on the front. Yeah, it's processed stuff just like any other shelf-stable packaged food. So I set out on the same path that the Clif bar inventor did: I aimed to make my own.

And if I'm in the middle of a long day on campus, I'll take all of the above except tasty. Granted, I love to care about food. But sometimes I have to be on campus all day, and I may not have time for a meal. So give me something that's healthy and convenient, and don't let me get into the habit of paying $5-7 each for lunch and dinner.

So I embark on Project Bar.

What was the result? A bar made of almost-equal amounts of whole wheat flour and pureed spinach and peas. Sprinkled with pistachios and dried blueberries. A couple eggs and baking powder so they weren't bricks. No added sugars (except for those in the blueberries, and there weren't really that many blueberries). I found them surprisingly palatable! (Of course, I also eat herring-and-sour-cream sandwiches on walnut bread, so I may be a bad judge of taste.) Anyway, I don't think anyone else would like these bars, but screw them, they're for me! And they're pretty healthy. Although I aim to make them better! I'm thinking for Bar v2.0, I may toss the blueberries (the only sweet ingredient) and make them more savory. Or maybe not; I'm eyeing grated carrots, beets, and perhaps mashed sweet potatoes as a way to keep them interesting. The pistachios are out; peanut butter may go in. If you'd like more updates on Project Bar, let me know. And once I perfect the recipe (or at least get something that other people might find edible) I could make you a batch! You, too, can eat healthily, cheaply, and conveniently!

Scotch'n'soda theatre: all about takin' up your whole life

Dear SnS,
I like you a lot. Without you, I'd be lost at CMU. That's not true. Without you, I would have taken longer to find "my place", which is to say, my friends, but I would have found them eventually, unless I was totally in the wrong university, in which case maybe I would have transferred. But all the great folks in SnS have shown me that I'm not in the wrong university.

However, now that I've found said niche, I'd like some time back! See, in the end, I'm not one of the 10% of SnS who wants to go on to a Broadway career. I just act to have fun, which is to say, to meet people. I've acted in seven shows (as five bit parts and two old men) and am about to start my eighth (as an old man). Of those, maybe two have been great experiences (WASP and Little Footsteps, my two "old men" roles), three have been "why the hell am I in a musical" experiences (The Wiz, Children of Eden, and City of Angels), and two have been sort of fun-to-hang-out-I-guess bit parts where I did a lot of sitting backstage (SotR '06 and The Lounge). Not to say they haven't been fun, or I didn't love the people doing them (have I mentioned that I like SnS because of the people?) but, you know, bit parts are hard.

So why have I stuck with it? (SnS: it hits because it loves) I don't know! Maybe because I don't want to be a mooch. I could hang around the SnS people (because I've made friends here) without doing shows, but then I'd feel a little out of the loop and I'd feel like I'm not contributing anything. But more likely, it's because I'm still in the "world is a resume" mindset, which (to quote The Lounge) "is so fucked!"

I have to realize that some people can be interesting without being in whatever organizations. It's true that there is a correlation between being cool and being involved. However, you can also be cool without being super-involved with everything. Say you are secretly an awesome cook. Or you go camping in neat parks. Or you carve your own canoes in your spare time. Whatever.

Beej is right though: it sorta eats up your undergrad experience. And boy, I'm glad I've done it, because SnS/CMU has been (and still is) a blast. But it makes me wonder what would have been, had I not been socializing with SnS so exclusively.

(answer: probably nothing. what would I do, join a frat? a sports team? the tartan? GCS? come on! all are lamer options.)

This is a little meandering, because I have Pascal's syndrome: "If I had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter." I'll claim the busy excuse. But it's getting better! A little better, all the time!

PS. Dear Future Dan who may be looking up this post in the archives, to sip on the sweet nectar of your (college) memories: at age 21 you promised never to lose your idealism. How are you doing?

A bit of self-reflection

Because what's a blog for?

One trait that I have that is probably one of my greatest strengths and greatest flaws is the unflagging belief that yes, you can have it all. Given a choice between two contradictory options, I will choose them both. Sometimes I will get them both! That is great! Sometimes I will not. This has awkward consequences.

For example, last night, my German friends Daniel, Michael, and Rena were in town. Also, it was Sarah's 21st birthday evening (ps. happy birthday, Sarah!). Plans got bandied about, with the conclusion that we all wanted to go to the Church Brew Works. Fine, except there were not enough cars, and we had just sat down to dinner at home. So I borrowed Aaron's car, rather presumptuously (ps. thanks, Aaron!), and took two trips, so we arrived just as they were all finishing their meals. A little awkward. Whatever.

And then the Church Brew Works wouldn't serve us beer because they couldn't accept their German ID's. D'oh! I guess this is a bad example of how you can't have it all, and a good example of how ID requirements are stupid.

Anyway, I overbook, overcommit, and don't really like to concede defeat or let anyone down, and sometimes I just can't do something, and (as my mom is fond of saying) I drop a plate, resulting in me conceding defeat and maybe letting someone down. I don't apologize for my certainty that everything is great all the time, but I should fine-tune it, and know when I'm justly confident and when I'm totally overcommitted, and stop overcommitting, because it really sucks when it all falls apart. If I've dropped your plate, I'm sorry!

ps. I'm all booked up (totally, all the time) until May 18.

much work - lunch + Jens = n

where n is a large number.

I had a long day today! It reminded me that there is work to do in this wonderful-yet-stressful little bubble world called CMU. For example, classes! 3 classes = 3 projects. Youch!

Also, as I walked into Formal Languages, Automata, and Computability (say THAT 3 times fast), I inadvertently dumped my lentils and black-eyed peas all over the floor. It was really quite funny. I think I'm the only one who found it funny. It helps to have a sense of humor when you walk into your class for the first time and dump your lunch on the floor.

All that aside, I just put Jens Lekman's "Night Falls over Kortedala" on the iPod, and I'll tell you, it's not often that I get so transfixed by a disc as to skip whatever else I was doing and play it all the way through, but this disc is one of them. Aaah! It's so good! Pop music with a little bit of kitsch and a lot of catchy beats. Plus his voice that is sweet and mellow like chocolate.

Did I mention I went skiing in Utah? Snow was the best, crowds were nonexistent, I took a group lesson and ended up getting a private lesson, our condo was deluxe, and (most importantly) I was staying with good friends. I am a lucky guy. My mom said "Well, you may have a new guardian angel who loves those black diamonds". As silly as that is, it's really a pretty cool sentiment.

Ski fever is back...

1/5/08 - Winter Storm Warning is Here!

January 5, 2008 10" so far and a Winter Storm Warning is in effect through Sunday night: 1-3 feet possible by Monday morning! Watch for delays and closures.

Eeeeeeeeeee!

January 3 is a great time to think about your next president, and winter is a great time to think about Summer.

I'd go with Obama. Edwards seems not to actually have a chance, and Barack will be less polarizing than Hillary. I mean, my dad's even warming up to him (he's reading his book). Plus he (at least claims that he) doesn't take campaign money from special interest groups (or something) and that's a nice change. The Plain Dealer had a page about the Republicans' stances on issues, and I'd say I'd still go with Ron Paul, but the rest are about the same, except Fred Thompson is particularly terrifying.

Whatever you do, vote for someone who cares about the environment! Because we can dick around with wars on terror and stupid stuff all day, but we can only put the environment on the back burner for so long.

But more enjoyably: Want to travel this summer? I do! If you're looking for a travel companion for sometime this summer, let me know! Or if you have any recommendations for places I should visit, let me know that too. I've got to take this chance to travel a bit, and I've got some destinations in mind, but I'm always open to more input. Particularly places that I can do more than just be a tourist (that is, places I can help out, or places where I know someone).

Top N, or Pour Me a Glass of that Delicious Kool-Aid, or How Are You Celebrating the New Year?

I'm sitting in a hotel lobby in The Villages, Florida. But you know what? It's been great! We had a funeral for my grandpa, a reception at his house with lots of relatives and fun, and a golf cart parade to a country club for a toast. (note to Beej: that last bit might be the whitest thing possible. but skiing in Utah for a week is still close.) I met some new family, talked with their old friends, and had a much better time than I imagined my grandpa's funeral could be. And that's how he would have wanted it. So yeah. I think I might not stay up 'til midnight this year, even, and I am sure not at any parties, and it's my favorite New Years Eve on record. Chew on that, social butterflies.

PS. This is a mid-script post-script. I am going to work for Google! I have accepted the offer. Microsoft's offer was tempting, but Google's won out. They are both great companies, I've had great experiences with both, and I can recommend them both heavily. I'll be living in Seattle (working at Google's #2 office), working on I don't know what, and, you know, enjoying free food and massages. If you'd like, bring it up sometime in conversation casually, and I can gush with excitement a little bit! I'll try not to weasel it in the conversation if you haven't brought it up.

Regarding the "top N" thing, I figured, well, I do like this year 2007 more than any other year that has ever been, and I do like people, and things, and I do like top N lists, and I do like using variables in everyday speech, so to ring out 2007 I shall combine them all.

I give to you the "Top N people, places, things, and events of 2007." I also give to you the usual slew of disclaimers, like "there are a variable number of entities" and "they are not in order, but they are in some semblance of order, like sorta-cool to really-cool, and maybe each one is +/- five slots, so something could even be cooler than something else 10 slots after it."

And also with a preface: this has been such a goddamn great year. I'm like that guy in Office Space except in reverse: every day is better than the day before, and I think I passed up my previous high-awesomeness-score day in about August, so now pretty much every day is the best day of my life. Thank you to all my friends and family. I love you all. Thank you for everything; I have no complaints whatsoever.

Bulleted list!

• Orbital's CD "The Middle of Nowhere". I heard this in a London bookstore, went home and looked it up, and got so excited that I decided to pick up a bunch of techno (more on the way) with two cool benefits: 1. listening to great stuff like the Prodigy, and 2. I can talk intelligently about music with my cousin James and uncle Jim (Tasse, that is).
• XKCD. If Toothpaste for Dinner was the comic for my last year (sarcastic, funny, but a little bitter), XKCD is the nerdy, cute, and hopeful this year.
  
• Of Montreal. The first half of this year was highly influenced by "The Sunlandic Twins" (certain songs still bring me right back to Austria) while the second half saw "Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?" flitting through my head. Good grief. These guys are solid pop music gold, in the experimental pop style of, say, The Beatles.
• St. Anton, Austria. Speaking of which. This is both a charming Alpine town, a good ski location, and my first totally-transplanted-immersed-in-another-culture experience. I don't think I had such a great time while I was there (although parts were really good) but now it's got a big chunk of the "halcyon" portion of my brain.
• Keepon. WHEN CAN I BUY THIS I WANT ONE NOW WISH IT WAS FREE AND ALL MINE DANCING YELLOW BLOB
  
• Erm, Morocco. The whole country. And Rob, Andy, Steve, and Jared for making sure I wasn't too much of a wuss to have the most notable long weekend I can remember.
• Tom, Jon, and Corinne, as their enthusiasm gives me hope about NPP's future! I remember we thought it might be a bad idea to invite 3 people to the PG at once. Nope! By far the best thing we did all semester. Also: everyone who comes to NPP workshops. I love you all. Keep coming, they'll be fun!
  
• Maastricht, the Netherlands. Lovely town, straight out of a fairy tale. Also within two hours of a few airports.
• Scotch'n'Soda Theatre, for welcoming me back into your open arms even after about a year and a half of not being involved, and a semester of being gone. Plus, there are so many of us now, and that's exciting! I mean, we threw awesome parties, put on good shows, and invited both Bingo O'Malley AND the Neo-Futurists in one semester!
  
• Maastricht University and particularly Nathalie. They provided a great place for me to study abroad, take some useful classes, take some not-so-useful classes. Nathalie is the nicest and best study abroad coordinator you could ask for.
• Seeing Live at a Pittsburgh Pirates game. Or maybe the one where I went with Sarah, the Math Club, and a slightly inebriated John Mackey. Either way, if you go to a Pirates game, you'll get your money's worth.
  
• My Maastricht friends. I mean, acquaintances, even. Clearly, those of you who I became good friends with, I wish I got to know you better and that we had more time. But if I shouted out to all my friends, this would get tiresome. So I mean here the people I had sorta chance encounters with. Of course, we were all (mostly) in the same studying-abroad boat, but thanks for making such an awkward time fun. Whether it's my acting-class friends, Beej's friends from Singapore, the beautiful French ladies I very awkwardly hung out with a few times, odd classmates, or even people like the girl I rode a bike with to a korfball practice across town that one time. You may have thought I was the weirdest dude, and I will probably remember these one-time encounters longer than you. But thanks for making me feel a little more welcome in a strange land. Gerrit, back me up that these sort of friends are cool. PS. if any of you are reading this, feel free to drop me a line!
• Oh shit, Granada, I almost forgot! I think this is where my chill-the-fuck-out semester hit its peak. You can't spend four days at the Rambutan Guesthouse there with no goals or worries (and "La Costa Brava" by Ted Leo ringing in your head) and still be anxious afterward.
  
• Microsoft. Betsy and Dina have been the friendliest, most helpful recruiters, Bill (my friend from high school) has been great, and thanks much to all you Microsofters I interviewed with or talked to once or twice. To totally quote Robert Frost like word for word, "I had two paths in this wood. They both looked good. I picked one of them. The other one looked good too. This poem is not about being a rebel. It's about how, if I had it to do over again, I might pick the other one. Seriously, they were both pretty good paths."
• Noah Smith. Thanks, Noah, for taking me on as an undergraduate research assistant last summer without even meeting me, for helping me along my senior thesis so far, and for believing that I can possibly make it in the research world when even I don't think I can.
• Beej, and him letting me live in his house. It's fun, and novel to me: I'm rooming with a great friend, and so far we haven't even grated on each other much! Instead, we've developed an eccentric relationship where we're either a fast-paced super-witty comic duo, or a 68-year-old married couple. Either way is fantastic. Also, the location is nice, and the house itself is super cool, and I'm starting to get over feeling bad about breaking it a little bit.
  
• Gramp. See my last post.
• Google. I'm so stoked. Thank you to Melissa and everyone else who worked to get me an offer there, thanks to CMU for making it so easy, and I am feeling on top of the world in that, I don't know what I want to do, but Google is the maximum likelihood hypothesis, and I'm working there.
• Sarah--*** this post has been interrupted by the the bloggy-police. this blogger has been apprehended and put on probation. if he commits one more aww-isn't-that-cute infraction, he must move this blog to LiveJournal.***
  

Gramp

My grandpa just died today. Those of you who've followed this blog for a while may have noticed my many notes about him throughout the past maybe three years. So it wasn't a big surprise. He had lung cancer, and then a variety of cancers (maybe it was just one that metastasized; I get third-hand information), and a tumultuous journey with chemo and radiation and everything else.

So I've become so desensitized to the whole thing, and I dunno, maybe I'm in denial or entirely heartless or something, but I'm fine. My grandma, mom, and uncle are understandably rather sad.

However, this doesn't change the fact that he was a pretty darn awesome grandpa. This is the kind of guy who started a group in his retirement community called the "Fraternal Order of Geezers" that had three rules:
1. you have to be at least somewhat interesting
2. I forget the second rule
3. you have to be able to pay for your own lunch

I'm pretty sure I inherited a lot of characteristics from him, such as:
- preference for quick and dirty fixes
- a healthy dose of denial of bad things in life
- a love of skiing
- above-average height and light eyes
- a very logical mind (he was a chemical engineer) and as such, a healthy dislike of organized religion

I hope I inherited more, such as:
- the ability to cut through nonsense and do whatever the hell he decides to do. My mom wrote a poem about him at one point that ended with the line "he taught us we can do anything."
- a fantastic sense of humor. He told lots of jokes. And he introduced me to such comedic greats as Laurel and Hardy and Sid Caesar.
- incredible money managing skills. He never made a ton, but he invested well. I remember one time he counted up everything he owned (including his dog, which he valued at $300) and found out that he was quite literally a millionaire. A $1.3 millionaire, in fact. Although, in his words, "having a million dollars isn't what it used to be."
- creativity! He wrote a novel! It never got published (I don't think) but it was close. He also made great Halloween costumes, and a remote-controlled dinosaur.
- adventurousness, both in terms of travel (I'm not sure where all he traveled to, but he traveled a bit) and life in general. Even in his old age, he would buy computers and stuff.
- ability to function despite handicaps (like not being able to see very well)
- probably most importantly, a sense of happiness with life. My mom recalls how he always whistled while he worked, quite literally. He and my grandma were very happily married too, all fifty-four years or whatever.

Anyway, he was quite a renaissance guy, loving, and happy, and there's not much higher praise in my mind. I can't think of anyone over 70 that I look up to more.

Happy Solstice!

The days are now getting longer.

In the last few days, I've hit the relatives whirlwind. And enjoyed it! It's nice meeting cousins who are grown-ups now. Check that- it's nice meeting cousins now that I'm a grown-up (sort of). I mean, granted, I still didn't get to talk to most of them beyond "where do you work now" but that's still interesting. Especially when the list of cousins looks like this:
- living in NYC doing I don't know what but making a lot of money, happily married with two bright, cute, and funny kids
- just got back from working to fight AIDS in Rwanda
- opened up a branch of his company which is owned by J.P. Morgan in London
- living in NYC doing marketing stuff for Liz Claiborne
- owning his own stock brokerage firm in San Diego, living the good life and partying on his boat
- getting a degree in computer animation or something
- working on a residency to become a radiologist
- quit his job and is full-time volunteering for the Obama campaign (PS vote for Obama, I'm sold. Or Ron Paul, but he's slightly less good because he will get Jon Nardolilli kicked out of college, but he won't actually because he won't actually do anything because his ideas are too crazy but in a good way, but anyway, vote for Obama. I mean, he smiles really nice, and hey, if he's good enough for Oprah...)
- finished law school, working in LA as a lawyer with her husband who's into movie production
- finished a masters in electrical engineering, now taking a couple more classes and working for a startup

It's enough to make one feel goddamn inadequate if he didn't just accept a position at ***** This broadcast interrupted to bring you this message: Always drink your ovaltine *****

Request for Comments again

Hey. Sorry, I know it's been a while. Listen, I am going home tomorrow and can probably vomit onto this blog for about 14 years once I do. But in the meantime, I have one question:

1. Do you know anyone who works for Google or Microsoft, and if so, could I ask him/her a few questions about what life at Google/MS is like, and if so, could you send me his/her contact info?

Thanks so much! Without talking too much about the job search (I totally will, don't worry, as soon as I accept an offer and the big "probably doesn't matter but you might as well not talk about it anyway" shields go down), I have to make a decision, and (as in the college decision process) nothing can help you make that decision better than a simple random sample of people who are there already, and (as in the college decision process) this sample is hard to find.

Don't get me wrong- recruiters from both places have been really great. But more information is always better!

We've solved the nutrition question!

It's just one number!

This irks me, because I tend to think I know a thing or two about nutrition (literally, a thing or two, not a lot of things) and that attaching numbers like this is misleading and will cause people to make more bad judgments. Especially if they find these numbers by combining other numbers. I mean, if you look at numbers (and follow current nutritional fads), Kashi GoLean cereal should be all you need: a lot of grams of fiber and protein, very little fat, no cholesterol, low sodium, and pretty low in calories per cup. Okay, so it's missing vitamins and minerals- so take a Centrum. Or a Flintstones vitamin. Whatever. There: by the numbers, you're eating super-healthy!

Maybe my biggest gripe is that I'll probably end up reading these numbers too, and I'll be just as deluded as everyone else.

The loneliest place in Pittsburgh

is not, in fact, the Wean cluster right before Thanksgiving break; instead, it is the Wean cluster DURING Thanksgiving break. Yessir, yessir, I locked myself out of my house. I'm a dumb guy.

Just got back from Florida, and while it did bug me to spend two days in slow motion, it was more than nice to see my grandparents and my uncle Jim. Plus I got to cook Thanksgiving dinner, which turned out really well, and made everyone a lot happier by sharing my good news.

Did I mention I have some good news? It's super exciting! Ask me if you haven't heard it! I have some bad news too, but the good news tends to cover it in my mind; you know how that goes.

And so I will continue to fritter away my time by doing a music vomit:

- I am liking the technoes more and more. (who am I, Jackie Bernard?) (not because she likes techno, but because she pluralizes things) And by that I mean, so far, Orbital, Aphex Twin, and the Prodigy. If you know what I should call those bands (besides just "techno"), or if you have any recommendations for similar bands, let me know!

- Patrick Wolf, "The Magic Position": RIYL David Bowie. (RIYL = "recommended if you like") This guy makes some pretty good orchestral pop.

- cloudDEAD: RIYL the Books but wish they were weirder. This is a little weird. Grows on you a bit though.

- Scissor Sisters: I started out hating them after "Don't feel like dancing", but now I kinda like them after "Lovers in the Backseat", "Music is a Victim", and of course their cover of "Comfortably Numb", which is gutsy but cool. Their pop is still the Spoonish sort of straightforward stuff that is not that great but still sticks in your head, but at least it's pretty good, and it sure is catchy, and also full of falsetto.

- Have I shout-outed Balkan Beat Box yet? They're great! Middle-eastern flavored pop, or pop-flavored Middle-Eastern, all a little bit hip-hoppy and dancey.

- Okay, the new Radiohead, it's awesome, shut up and die. Seriously, though, if you've never known what's the big deal about the Radioheads, this might be as good a place as any to start. "Bodysnatchers" is as good a rock song as anyone can make, of course "Nude" and "Reckoner" will grow on you, and I really like "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi", and even moreso "All I Need".

- Klaxons. They're like a band called "Portugal. The Man", which is like an accessible Mars Volta, but the Klaxons don't sound anything like the Mars Volta; instead, they're more like a slightly more sugary Bloc Party. Which is to say, there are flashes of brilliance (at least a few) and some dullness. The first tune ("Two Receivers") will drag you in to this CD. Epic rating: 2 1/2 epics out of 5.

- Pavement- I listened to Slanted and Enchanted again, disliked it again, but then grew to love it again. It's really good. "Conduit For Sale!" remains a favorite of mine, but this time it was joined by "Trigger Cut/Wounded Kite at :17" or whatever track 2 is called.

- Last and Most (not least!) Tegan and Sara, "The Con". Whoa. I was not prepared for the duo behind the catchy but annoying "Walking with the Ghost" to come up with something as sweeping as this! It's equally catchy, but in a minor key, and very grand! It's got a great album feel- 1 is a nice intro, 2-5 feel like one cohesive song, 6 is a dumb pop tune, then there are a couple of short tracks and a few with more meat at the end. Great drums and rhythms on 3 and 5. I love this album! RIYL: Mates of State

Upon realizing, thanks to Alex Belton's blog, that I did a bit more spouting than asking for advice...

and that asking for advice is usually a good thing, I will now do so. I may have the opportunity to live in two places:

1. Seattle

2. The San Francisco Bay Area, meaning about 30 miles from SF, in the heart of Silicon Valley (I'd probably live in SF and commute via train)

So if you know anything about these places (you've lived there, visited there, generally like or dislike either one), and/or have any opinions, let me know! I have a lot of thoughts of my own, but I'd like your unbiased ideas.

And there's the off chance I may end up in Boston, too, as there is one company there that I'm considering. So throw that in the list if you have any ideas about it.

First post in weeks, and it's just a link?

Essentially, yes. In the meantime, I've been flying around and interviewing with (company's name withheld for professionalism reasons), (company's name withheld for professionalism reasons), and (company's name withheld for professionalism reasons). It's very exciting! I can tell you that I really liked (CNWFPR) and want to work there, I was sort of impressed by (CNWFPR) and would be okay with working there, and don't really want to work at (CNWFPR). Come on, you can't post that stuff on a blog. Talk to me to fill in the blanks!

I will say that I'm not sure how I like the Bay Area, and the big reason is distance. I mean, I love the Bay Area because San Francisco seems one of the top n coolest cities in the country, where n is a small number. I mean, here's my unordered list of cool cities in the US, in my humble opinion, and by "humble opinion" I mean "random guessing":
Seattle
San Francisco
Boston
Chicago
Austin
New York
Portland
Pittsburgh
Okay, maybe that is actually ordered. SF seems nice. I only saw it at night, which is not quite fair, but I will say two nice things about it anyway
- As you drive in, it's like a scene out of the Matrix. Beautiful, exciting, and I wish I had had a camera. This picture doesn't even do it justice.
- It's the most colorful city! Even at night. I walked around the North Beach, Haight Ashbury, and the Mission for a while, and was just wowed by all the colors on signs and everywhere.
However, I wouldn't be working in SF; I'd be working in (city name withheld as it might give away a company name) or (CNWAIMGAACN). Which means a long commute, even on the CalTrain (which sounds very good); it'd be a bike ride plus a long train ride. I think I could deal with it though. I'd rather live there than in (CNWAIMGAACN), despite (perk of living in CNWAIMGAACN withheld as it may give away company name).

Talk to me in a month or so, and I'll have decided my future, and I'll be all gushing about whatever job I've chosen, and THAT'S okay to put on a blog! But for now it's all got to stay vague, I think.

Okay, so not just a link. Here's the link I was going to post. I'd heard about this "Keepon" guy before: he's a robot just recently invented by CMU folks, and he dances. What I didn't know is how goddamn CUTE he is!
AAAAAAAAAAAAH!
AAAAAAAH!

This sort of stuff makes me sing Louis Armstrong. Not just stuff that's doing service to humanity, or stuff that's bizarre, or stuff that's cute, or stuff that's genuinely impressive, but stuff that matters to fall in the intersection of all those categories. I've got some bizarre loop playing in my head of
"I see great comedians, and philosophical dogs,
smart hedgehogs and dancing yellow blobs
and I think to myself... what a wonderful world."

I choose you, Ubuntu!

But it's all right, everything is all right, the struggle is finished. I have won the victory over myself. I love LINUXES.

I just got a DUAL BOOT up and running on my new hard drive. (that means it runs Linux, but I can restart it and pick Windows and it'll run Windows if I want.) 120gb of space, a new Windows installation, and to top it off, Ubuntu 7.04 "Feisty Fawn". So far, I'm pretty happy with the Linuxes; it's a lot quicker and easier to get it up and running than it is to get the Windows up and running. I don't need to download 84 updates (literally) for an hour, then hunt around for my video driver which no longer exists. I do need to dick around with partitions, but that's because I'm dual booting, and it's not Linux's fault.

But I don't want to judge based on a couple days' worth of experience. I'll let you know my verdict after I've, for example, developed for a bit. But my initial response is that it's about as easy as Windows, and it fits in better with my Fair-Trade-coffee-and-riding-a-bike kind of life.

By the way, CCARNGIE MELLORN

Take that, Identity Style Guide. I will teabag you later.

I'm excited about The Lounge. Not because we're creating great theatre. Mostly because it will be super fun.

A Taoist would say desire is the root of all pain

If you don't want things, you can't be sad if you don't get them. Therefore, no desires, no unhappiness. Fair enough.

I'd be a miserable Taoist right now, because I really really want to get a job at Google.

Let me tick off some great things about Google:
- They do everything better than everyone else (they just launched Google Translate!)
- They have the most data and the most interesting problems
- They treat their engineers like royalty; they give you everything you need to do your job
- um, well, free food... that is actually nutritious and appetizing.
- And did I mention the freakin' 20% time? This is so revolutionary and so smart. If you don't know what I mean (and get a little shiver when you think about the possibility of working for a company that lets you do that), click on the link.
- EDIT: "Don't be evil." That may be the greatest thing about them. So far, they're pretty much the least evil giant corporation that I can think of.

Let me continue by ticking off some great things about Seattle:
- Super cool neighborhoods
- Pike Place Market! (see #5 and #7)
- On the subject of food, the International District, featuring many Asian markets
- People (apparently) care about the environment and stuff
- Lots of young people, lots of nerds, thanks to all the tech companies
- The air smells good there! It is so lush!
- An hour or two from great skiing, and 4 hours from the best skiing anywhere.

Tomorrow I will know if my application is moving on! (I interviewed there on Friday) Wish me luck!

Best day/best day

Hi! I'm back from the sunny and burning region known as Los Angeles. What a great two days! Although that's like saying "I was eating coffee-flavored ice cream. What a good food!" Of course it was great. I was traveling.

But Sunday in particular was like that improv game, best day/worst day, except it was just best day. I got all my homework for the week done on the plane (proof that I should stop worrying, because a week's worth of homework = five hours). Met my cousin and her husband (so my cousin-in-law?) who were supremely welcoming, which was nice, because going to LA is somewhat intimidating!

Side note: back when I was a little kid, my friends and I would make simple computer games. One that we made once was called "BOMB". The plot was summed up in one sentence: "Your goal is to dismantle a car bomb set to blow up the United States." So you'd travel to various cities and win money or lose money or get a bomb detector or something. Anyway, when you go to LA, the screen would display:
You get off the plane and somebody shoots you.
Then it beeped five times. The end!
End side note!

So there's that. Plus, it's so goshdarn big to see in one day. But thanks to Jessica and Matt, I felt right at home. They told me some cool places to go. I went there. I think I found some of the hipster/vegetarian/young/nerdy places, which is the kind of place I'd like to live. There were more secondhand clothing stores than I could shake a secondhand stick at. That is awesome! There were also a lot of trendy boutiques. That is not so awesome! There were some cool comic book stores. That is awesome! I have to read more graphic novels.

Dinner: awesome Mexican food at a restaurant called "El Compadre." Maybe it's just because of my preexisting bias that "LA Mexican food is so much better than midwest Mexican food", but man, LA Mexican food is so much better than midwest Mexican food. Hung out at the bar afterwards and watched the Indians get pounded. Okay, that was the one part of the day that doesn't qualify as "best day." BIG FROWNS. But the bartender bought me a beer as consolation (he was a Sox fan).

And then... this day wasn't awesome enough yet, so I noticed a sign on a restaurant advertising the Go! Team playing a concert that night. Wait, THE Go! Team? Awesome! After a half hour trying to find parking for this venue that I wasn't sure even existed, there I was, watching Bodies of Water (who seem pretty good... at least, they have two trombones) open for the Go! Team. Man, they are electric on stage! Even though their horns were just sampled, watching them do their thing was a blast. If you get a chance to see the Go! Team, you ought to.

Next day, my interviews were cool. It ain't professional to go into more details than that on a blog, I think. Let me say Burbank is really a bummer. It feels like a dusty old highway-stop town with a big old gob of Cheesecake-Factory "gentrification" or whatever they call it when someone tosses CF and friends at an otherwise-reasonable city.

LA is a little bit of a bummer too. At least there's something going on there, it's big enough. But it has downsides:
1. It feels junky! There's islands of glitz among a ton of junk. Nothing I saw felt anything near as welcoming or nice as Squirrel Hill.
2. It's so goddamn hot, which makes it feel junkier.
3. CARS EVERYWHERE. Not bikes or public transport.
But then, big up:
1. Awesome Mexican food everywhere.
Still, it's no match for Seattle, the Bay Area, Boston, or even Pittsburgh, in my mind.

God, please let the Indians win game 7

...for my dad's sake. He'll be bummed for approximately fourteen years if they lose.

Find YOUR spot, or, I (heart) internet surveys, or, I must be raciss as hell!

There is this website where you answer a bunch of questions and it tells you where you should live. Yeah, you know, internet blah blah blah, but they have a pretty thorough questionnaire, so I figure it's as good a recommendation as you can get for 5 minutes on the internet. Look at my results! Huh. I love this city!

Edit: link doesn't really work. Well, whatever. Here's the list it gave me. A little heavy on the crappy pseudo-northeast cities (Buffalo? Erie? um, Harrisburg?) but it reaffirms my belief that I really should live in the Pacific Northwest. Or Pennsylvania, apparently.
1. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
2. Carlisle, Pennsylvania
3. Worcester, Massachusetts
4. Hartford, Connecticut
5. Seattle, Washington
6. Providence, Rhode Island
7. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
8. Altoona, Pennsylvania
9. New Haven, Connecticut
10. Tacoma, Washington
11. Columbus, Ohio
12. Denver, Colorado
13. Erie, Pennsylvania
14. Spokane, Washington
15. Syracuse, New York
16. Rochester, New York
17. Portland, Oregon
18. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
19. Buffalo, New York
20. Albany, New York
21. Lancaster, Pennsylvania
22. Anchorage, Alaska
23. Nashua, New Hampshire
24. Olympia, Washington

I missed Blog Action Day!

This day happened a few days ago where everyone blogged about the environment. I forgot! so I am doing it now:

I think you should save the environment. There are two questions: how?, and why?

First, how? I don't know if it's possible to achieve a sustainable way of living without giving up major parts of the lifestyle that you and I have grown accustomed to. However, I'd like to give it a try. There are often easy ways to do this, and you can do it to, if you just think about it a little bit and go an even littler bit out of your way.

The answer is not "sell your car and hug a tree." It's not about going backward to the good ol' days before we had disposable plastic bottles and paper towels. It's about going forward and using our prodigious smarts to set up better systems.

For example: Note where you can recycle paper (example: the CMU recycling room!). Then, next to your trash can, keep a box. If you're going to throw paper away, put it in the box instead. When the box gets full (every couple months in my house) toss it in a big backpack and bring it to campus the next time you go. Ta-da! You no longer waste paper. Total elapsed time: maybe 10 minutes every two months.

Also, buy organic fair-trade locally-grown things. Now, I don't think we can buy our way to sustainability; that thinking kinda goes against the whole idea. But it can't hurt!

Okay, now second, the why. Why save the environment? I'll tell you why: because we live in a goddamn fantastic world! And what's so great about it?

Tuesday night, I turned on my laptop to find: "Non-system disk or disk error. Replace and press any key to continue." I reached for my floppy drive to pull out the floppy disk. Hup-- I have no floppy drive! My stomach lurched. I think a couple other organs lurched too. My hard drive was toasted! And of course, I hadn't backed up since like June, on my parents' external HD. My project! My music library! My dreams! My list of movies to see! My recipes! My, uh, digital album notes from the Arcade Fire's "Neon Bible"!

Wednesday morning, I brought it into the help center to make sure it was the hard drive that was gone. Nope, it booted up fine.

Now, in a just world, there is no way I get to save my hard drive. It's gone. And someone has told misc.market and all the techies are laughing at me. But I actually got the second chance! The one you don't ever get! And now my computer is on, and all my data is backed up on my new external HD!

So THAT is what is so great about the world, and THAT is why you should save the environment, because no environment = ozone layer hole and massive tsunamis = us departing this world for whatever afterlife, and I would not want to leave a world that is benevolent enough to give you that second chance.

Hello The Facebook.

I had mixed feelings about blogs on The Facebook. But what the hell? If it works for Jacques Strappe, it's good enough for me. And I can always take it off.

Speaking of The Facebook, I had an interview with them. Neat, right? I mean, it's absurd. How does an employee of The Facebook take himself/herself seriously?* Nevertheless, they work with some of the coolest brand-newest technology. The stuff that Google's doing with massive parallel computation; Google's doing that, The Facebook is doing that, and who else? Geek out moment, but I feel like if anyone's going to compete with Google in any sphere, it's The Facebook. And they're pretty successful so far.

*Hello The Facebook recruiters! I keep putting self-conscious notes like this, but in this case it's completely appropriate, because now my blog is on The Facebook. If The Facebook does any kind of background checking at all, maybe they'll look on THEIR OWN SITE first. Note to The Facebook recruiters: I don't mean "how does a facebook employee take himself/herself seriously?" in a bad way. It just seems silly, but actually isn't. It's like selling fluorescent colors for a living.

Also, I have great taste in music. At least, I like to think so. And I'd like to work for a company that thinks that is a good thing. I've got the new Go! Team on my ipod now and it's making me happy. Speaking of happy: The Fiery Furnaces, They Might Be Giants, Tally Hall, and Broken Social Scene are all coming to Pittsburgh.

In other news, gooo indians! They're up 2-1 over Boston- awesome. And I'm going home on Thursday to go to the game! It's like my childhood all over again... but a decade later!

Oh yeah! And Sunday/Monday I'll be in LA! What the geek, yo?! Next Thursday/Friday/Saturday is Seattle! I still like airports!

A note to those who drink alcohol but do not buy it

First, I'd like to say that the party on Saturday night was a great success (if I do say so myself...). Thanks so much to everyone who came to make it so much fun. The rest of this note is of a rather unsavory financial nature, and I don't want the matters of filthy lucre to despoil the memory of such a joyous occasion. (indeed, one could view such a weekly party as our youthful worship service (now hear me out dammit) in that we set aside a time from our work and nonsense lives to lose ourselves among friends (perhaps with alcoholic assistance) and suck every minute out of a night that we can. granted, this metaphor is a stretch. but this is a note for another time!) I don't regret the money I spent on the party a bit.

Second, here's the main point of this note: parties are expensive. To those of you who donated to the donation jar yesterday, thank you! I still lost a boatload of money on the party, though. Again, no regrets, but I can't keep doing this, and the other people who buy you alcohol can't either. I don't think anyone's trying to rip me off or anything; I think people just don't know how much stuff costs. So I'll throw out prices that a couple reasonable drinks cost the buyer:

Cheap beer (Pabst class): $15 for a case of 30 cans = 50c each.
Normal beer (like a Yuengling): $20 for a case of 24 bottles = ~$1 each.
Nice beer (Sam Adams, Blue Moon, etc.): tend to cost $9-12 for a 6-pack, so ~$1.50-$2 each.

Smirnoff vodka: $24 for a handle (1.75 liters). 1.75 liters ~ 1.75 quarts = 56oz. Now, if you pour some in a cup and add a mixer, you might pour about 2 oz. So you get 28 drinks' worth out of a handle. So each 2 oz. drink costs you about $1.
Vladimir vodka: about half that, or 50c.
Bacardi rum: comparable to Smirnoff vodka.
Tanqueray gin: $20 for a fifth (0.75 liters). So that's about 24 oz., so a 2-oz. drink might cost $1.50-$2.
Kahlua: between Smirnoff and Tanqueray, I think. $1-$1.50.

Mixers tend to be cheaper... 8 oz. cranberry juice, milk, orange juice, tonic, or cola will cost 50c or less.

It adds up, though. Say you're making a White Russian. A shot of vodka, a shot of Kahlua, and fill it up with milk, and it'll be worth $2-2.50. Your vodka and cranberry could be $1.50, gin and tonic $2, etc. Multiply times a few drinks... toss in a little for cups and ice and snacks and stuff, and that's a big hit on the liquor purchaser/party host.

So what am I saying? Give a good donation at your next party. Tossing in a dollar or two and figuring "well, I'm only drinking a little" isn't going to cut it. I'd say $5 will cover you if you have a tolerance like me; maybe more if you're slightly more stout of constitution, and maybe a little less if you're drinking light or only quaffing a few PBR's. And don't forget! We old folks aren't trying to make money here, we're just trying to break even, but we routinely fall way short.

Wait, I see a hand in the back: "You don't have to buy such nice alcohol!" Would you like me to buy cheap stuff? If that's what people want, I'll gladly do that. I won't scoff at you- I've been known to enjoy the ol' Pabst myself. Another hand: "Quit whining! If you don't want to spend money, don't host parties!" Fair. I could do that too. But then it's less fun for everyone... I don't want to lose our chances to hang out just because of the price of boooooooooooze.

Thanks for listening; I will not speak of this again. But if I host a party and charge money or something, no whining allowed! And when you go to other people's parties, know how much you drink monetarily, and make sure to donate that much.

Some things that make me excited:

Last Monday: that Of Montreal/Grand Buffet show. A few notes:
Grand Buffet creates the most enjoyable concerts I've ever seen.
Of Montreal creates some of the most enjoyable music I've ever heard. (how about that qualifier there? I think they're maybe #4 on my favorite-bands list.)
Oberlin is neat, and not actually any less nerdy than CMU. I think. It is out in the middle of nowhere, though.
Getting out of town to clear your head a bit is nice.
And "Song Association" may be my new favorite car game. It works like this: someone sings a song. If that reminds you of a song, you start singing and they stop. Repeat.

Yesterday: while sleep deprivation makes you sad, it evidently magnifies the effects of caffeine. Whoa. I was on a cloud at about 9:30 PM.

Tomorrow: teaching a Concepts recitation about counting. Combinatorics. It's the most fun math.

Starting this weekend: the Indians vs. the Red Sox in the ALCS. Woo!

Friday: Improv show with free cereal! I'm so stoked about the cereal. 8PM, UC Danforth, be there.

Saturday: Glow in the dark party. See you there (and by "there" I mean "my house"). Yeah!

Another reason to root for the tribe:

Great taste in music.

I point you to Travis Hafner ("Du Hast") as a shining example. Between the whole team, they also managed to hit Static-X, Mims, Metallica, Audioslave, John Mellencamp, Collective Soul, and Staind.

I propose a rock-off: Indians Mix vs. Pirates Mix. (Disturbed!) Or maybe vs. Dungeon Mix.

Go Tribe!

You may be familiar with the Major League of Baseball. Also, it's October, which makes all of us former baseball fans think about postseasons, World Series glory, and early dark nights with huge stadiums packed with fans and lights. Where it's nighttime but it's still so bright because you're focused on this turbo-lit field.

Anyway, the Cleveland Indians are back in it! They actually are tied for the best record in baseball. They have two power starters (C.C. Sabathia and Fausto Carmona), which is crucial in the short best-of-5 and best-of-7 series. They have a pretty solid bullpen too (except the closer, Joe Borowski, maybe), and a decent lineup. The point is, this year they have a chance to actually do something cool. Through the 90's, they came so close to winning a world series, but never really did, and then sucked for the first half of the 2000's. They haven't won the Series since 1948.

Hell, Cleveland has not won any MLB, NFL, or NBA championships since 1948. That is so long. Red Sox, quit your whining. And don't even get me started on the Yankees. What I'm saying is, if you're looking for a team to root for, root for the Indians!

Also, this.