The Kindness of Strangers

I’m watching the game now. It’s crazy. 67-64 Detroit with six minutes left.

I’ve been up in Redmond, WA for almost two weeks now. Here are some pictures:

	The common room of our apartment		My room
	Ping pong :)		My building, on one of the few sunny days
	Some friends		My friend Andrew doing a neat disc trick
	The Space Needle		Elie’s Porsche

Also, Brendan sent me some pictures from his visit to California, which are pretty amazing. My favorites are this, this, this, this, this, and of course this (my room in Berkeley :).

Okay wow Margaret just called and now I’m back and the Pistons just won. Woohoo!

My roommates, Naveen and Manu, are awesome, and we’ve made some good friends up here already, in addition to the rest of the Berkeley crowd and other old friends that are here too. If only I could get certain other people up here it would be perfect. I haven’t been reading as much as I’d have liked, and my bike is still in its box, but both of these deficiencies should be remedied soon. In the meantime I’ve been watching lots of movies, working out with Naveen and Manu (who are hardcore enough that protein shakes are de rigueur, and they actually know what all the exercises are called), trying to learn how to cook South Indian food from Naveen, and playing guitar, table tennis, foosball, and some ultimate. I guess I go to work somewhere in there, too. I’ve also been to Seattle a couple of times. On our most recent trip we hung out with Manu’s friend Elie, and got to see the Porsche he just won in an online poker tournament. Nuts!

One thing that’s changed is that I haven’t had a lot of thinking time to myself. Not sure why this is, but the end result is that I don’t have much new to say these days. Hence the bland LJ entries :).

Umesh, Meera, and Maya surprised me with a ticket to see Sarah McLachlan next month. It was incredibly thoughtful of them, especially since I’ve never seen her live before and I didn’t even know she’s touring now. Sarah is an amazing musician, able to write lyrics and melodies that are both beautiful and darkly haunting. If you haven’t heard her best album, Solace, you should. Anyway, my family is awesome :).

I’m trying to burn all my CDs before I leave for Microsoft so I can put them on my mp3 player. So whenever I’m home I’m constantly shuffling CDs in and out of my laptop. I have it start playing the CD while it’s ripping so that when the music stops I know to switch to the next CD. It’s actually been kinda fun to alphabetically sample stuff. Anyway, I’m only on M now and there’s no way I’m going to finish.

Bill and I submitted a paper on Wednesday. We had been working probably 15 hours a day for the previous three weeks. Our chance of acceptance is very low, and it was weird to spend so much time on something that will most likely be a lost cause. Actually, I found it very easy to get bitter, as our ideas and results are really quite good, but unconventional (we submitted a PL-influenced paper to a systems conference). We could basically envision the program committee “not getting it”, which of course would be supremely irritating.

Then it occurred to me that this bitter no-one-understands viewpoint is also the one that most deranged prophets must take as well. I guess I know where I stand, then :).

Anyway, it’s all over and I’m just glad to have my life back for a while.

Blargh. To tell you the truth, I don’t really feel like writing this LJ entry. Maybe I’ll write more later.

Oh yeah, here’s something random that I promised certain people (Naveen) I’d write about, even though he’s going to make fun of me for doing so. Have you ever fallen asleep on one of your arms so that when you get up, it’s asleep too, and basically immobile for a minute or so? Maybe you’ve never experienced this before; let me assure you that it’s a weird feeling.

Sometimes I get to have even more fun: I wake up somehow lying on both of my arms. I don’t even know how this is physically possible, but it happens, and it’s really great because I derive so much pleasure from trying to sit up with my arms hanging like deadweights. It’s a good ab workout. My ecstasy is occasionally heightened by the challenge of having to turn off the blaring alarm that woke me up in the first place — without the use of my arms. (It’s even better when the alarm is my cell phone, which it is these days, and I have to somehow open it up and push a tiny button, or just wait, head ringing, until my arms wake up.)

There’s nothing better than sharing this experience with a good friend, too. I vividly remember one morning back in college when James and I were roommates. Back then, my alarm was a clock that emitted the most monstrously hideous sound, a kind of braying howl that you could imagine a hellhound making if all three of its heads had contracted laryngitis. Apparently, I needed that kind of motivation to get up during parts of college.

Anyway. So morning came, and the alarm started emitting its banshee wail. I snapped into consciousness, only to find that both my arms were asleep and lying useless below me. I felt some tingling in my fingertips, like some kind of phantom phantom-limb syndrome, but that’s about it. If I could only have gotten up, I’d probably have tried to smash my forehead into the snooze button, but I couldn’t even do that. So I just lay there, moaning.

James, who’s a slightly heavier sleeper, and who had no intention of actually getting up this early (I’m usually good about turning off my alarm before it disturbs him up), finally woke up to this chorus:
the alarm: BRAAAAAAAAAAAA! BRAAAAAAAAAAAA!
me: ughhghghghhg. ughghhghgg. godddddd. ugghhghghghgh.

As you can imagine, he had to bail me out by staggering across the room to silence Cerberus. Amazingly, he did this in good humor. Yeah, James was a good roommate.

Bill, Manu and I have been working on this CS project a lot recently. It has a lot of good ideas, and is pretty fun to do, but I’m also getting a little tired of spending 14 hours a day in Soda. The project is called Katana, just because it sounds cool…. although Bill just recently realized it’s the perfect acronym, too: Kicking Ass and Taking Names.

Margaret got invited to an Ultimate tournament last weekend, and with her help I managed to weasel my way on the team as well. The tournament started out drearily, but each successive game got better, and we ended up winning the whole thing, which was really cool. The championship game came down to the wire, and we prevailed 15-14.

Right now I’m on a bus driving back up from our annual research retreat in Santa Cruz. I enjoyed this year’s retreat more than last year’s, mostly because there weren’t as many talks, and I got to spend more time throwing disc on the beach :).

Okay, so you’ve got to help me out here. You know about the grossness of hotel bedspreads, right? UV-light and all that. Okay, so at Kristen’s wedding I had a great idea for a new urban legend. (Okay, I confess: almost no one else thought it was great.)…. A women checks into a hotel and gets pregnant from lying on the bed. I think it has just the right mix of plausibility (everyone kind of knows about the bedspread thing) and total ridiculousness. Right, so most of my friends laughed me off, but William, one of my friends in med school, had the perfect response when I told him: “… yeah, and I delivered her baby!” That’s the kind of enthusiasm and blatant, calculated disregard for the truth that we need to spread this around. My goal is to get on snopes.com. You too can help me realize this sick dream; spread the word.

On a related note, Jeff and I noticed how we were exceedingly vulgar whereas all of our married or engaged friends were exceedingly bori- I mean, not vulgar, even though some of them used to be. At first we hypothesized that getting engaged made you less vulgar, but then we quickly realized that the converse was really true: a good reason for why we’re not engaged is that we’re still a bunch of perverted lowlifes. (lives?)

—–

I used to love the Internet, and then for a couple of weeks early this month I hated it, and now I love it again.
This is my story.

I had written the beginnings of an LJ entry about an hour ago into the LJ web update form. (I’m using Linux and am too lazy to get Drivel.) The entry was really quite boring — mostly an update of my life — and luckily I was interrupted by a bunch of telephone calls. By the time I got back to my computer, I decided that I’d scrap most of the entry… and then conveniently Mozilla crashed and took the nascent entry with it.

So here is everything in a nutshell:
Went to Kristen’s wedding in Miami this past weekend. It was a blast. I am now a fan of Miami. Congrats Kristen!

I’m going to Microsoft this summer. I’ve been wanting to explore the Seattle area for a while, and it’s supposed to be beautiful up there in the summer, so it should be a good time. Also I’ll be living with Manu and Naveen, which promises to be awesome. And I might learn get some good ol’ south Indian cooking lessons from Naveen. Aww yeah.

I’m working really hard on a couple of papers. This means staring at my computer all day. I think at least one of the papers could be quite good but there’s the distinct danger of spreading myself too thin and having both turn out poorly. We’ll see.

Our soccer team made it to the second round of the playoffs for the second season in a row. There are four divisions of eight teams in the league, and our division was stacked: all four of our teams that made it to the playoffs won their first games, so four of the top eight teams overall were from our division.

To illustrate how ridiculous it was, as the fourth team in our division, in the first round of the playoffs we played the number one team from another division. This team went 7-0 with 39 (!) goals for. (We went 4-2-1 with 13 GF.) The match was a really exciting 1-1 nailbiter that we ended up winning on penalty kicks, 4-3.

Then due to a quirk in the schedule for the next round we ended up playing another team from our division that had beaten us 1-0 during the regular season. That match was a boring 0-0 draw — and we lost on PKs, 4-3.

Okay, I’m bored, you’re bored. Full stop.

Saw Pinback and Enon at Bimbos last night. It was an awesome show! I need to start going to more concerts, just like the old days…

I found this picture using Lee’s new search interface to his photo album:

It’s pretty cool because it shows how dorky I am: wearing glasses, playing video games in a hotel. Yes, there’s an interesting story behind this.

The guy sitting next to me is my friend Lonnie (picture). In addition to being a super-cool guy (and earning my eternal gratitude for introducing me to American Analog Set and reintroducing me to the Lips), he’s also the most prodigious spender I’ve ever met.

When we were working at IBM, he and our other friend Brian lived on the top floor of a swank Boston apartment building, paying what must have been around $3000/month. Between them they had a 57″ HDTV and two 36″ TVs. (For the less mathematically inclined, that’s more TVs than they could sensibly watch at once.) Brian had a 400-disc CD changer despite having only 10 CDs. Lonnie bought a saxophone and an organ, even though he didn’t know how to play them, because he thought they were cool. (He also happens to be awesome at guitar, and owns a good half-dozen of those.)

So basically this meant that it was incredibly fun to hang around with them, because you never knew what they were going to get next.

One time we were going down to Southbury, Connecticut for a couple of days to participate in our group’s annual kick-off event. Since we were all going, this promised to be a fun time (and in fact we did end up doing fun stuff like playing water polo in the hotel’s pool), and Lonnie and Brian hatched on the idea of bringing their XBox down so that we could play at the hotel.

Good idea. Most normal people would stop there. However, they were driving down and back in Brian’s Ford Explorer, which mean that there were going to be four hours during which they couldn’t play on the XBox. So they decided to buy a TV to bring in the car so they could play on the drive. Let that sink in a second: they bought a TV for the car ride. Yes, this is true.

Ah, but ye olde cigarette lighter — even the one in a powerful, masculine, I-guzzle-gas-like-real-men-guzzle-beer SUV — couldn’t hand the load of powering a TV and the XBox. So they bought this $70 battery thing that could supposedly provide the juice.

We set off, and all went well… except for the fact that five minutes into the trip (before they had even left Boston), the battery couldn’t handle it and blew itself out. Now this might deter the likes of you or me. Not Lonnie, though — he just stopped at MicroCenter and picked up another battery thing. It was an awe-inspiring performance: two $70 batteries and a TV, and all for a drive to Southbury. I know time is money, but I never realized it was that expensive. I love those guys.

I don’t even remember if the second battery survived, but we did play in the hotel, as you can see. I think in the picture I’m getting my ass kicked at Halo or something.

(Note also that next to the XBox controller was my form of extravagant entertainment: a pack of cards. Yes, I too am a practitioner of debaucherous hedonism.)

———

I love reading the best of Craig’s List. Most of my favorites are decidedly unprintable, but I will include a few good (and relatively kosher) ones here for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!

Rant: My Crazy Girlfriend
The Union Station Bike Pilferers
Rant: God pooped on my day
Chat room…
Rave: My OCD ex-girlfriend

And an actual nice, touching post about guys:
Ode to men
It warms my heart.

———

Life can be so complicated. Luckily, there’s Grant…. and other small things. Not that Grant is small. Actually he’s huge. Rephrase: “and other things that, unlike Grant, happen to be small”.

In an email to me, Marianne wrote, on being a student, “I guess that even if you don’t feel like you belong there, you know you do. I think one of the main purposes of universities is to make you feel small and stupid, so that you’ll try even harder. I’ve never understood that kind of pedagogy, but it seems to be very widely spread.”

No, I’m not feeling sorry for myself; I just think it’s an insightful observation.

On a related note, I remember that when I was working at IBM, we came across a study that showed that depressed people tend to be more productive. (johnxorz and I loved this.)

The proposed explanation accompanying the data was that depressed people want to take their minds off of whatever’s making them sad, so they throw themselves at their work, whereas happy people see work as a distraction from their good mood, so they don’t apply themselves as much. Sounds reasonable.

I’m weird in that when I get depressed, which happens every so often (but not now), I actually kind of enjoy it. I spend a lot more time than I usually do thinking about what I like and what I’m like, what I want and who I want to be. I feel a kind of observational clarity where I normally feel my perception is clouded by [things I’m not going to list here].

Anyway, I guess being more productive is another good thing :).

I’ve had some kind of online “presence” since my freshman year in college. Sometimes I go back and read things I’ve written before, as I did a couple of week ago in assembling those “interesting entries”. I am invariably embarrassed by some of the things I’ve written. You might think that this embarrassment stems from my maturation as a writer and thinker: that I’m embarrassed that an old entry doesn’t represent the ideas and thoughts of the now-me, that the equal standing given to it by the (mostly) temporally-blind web allows for a gross misrepresentation of who I am (or want to be, or, even, want to be perceived as) and so is cringe-worthy.

Sometimes you’d be right. (As far as writing goes, though, I’m actually trying to be looser these days. I’d have never let “perceived as” go back then. But more about grammar in another entry, perhaps.) However…

In real life, I get embarrassed pretty easily. Mostly (and this might be amusing to less neurotic people, maybe) it occurs when I realize, usually some time after a conversation has ended, that I’ve been bragging. Boasting is a huge turn-off for me — probably #1 all-time — and when I realize that I’ve done some of my own, it just kills me.

The funny thing is that I don’t realize I’m doing it while I’m talking. I, like most people (I imagine), am secretly proud of some things I’ve done, and while I consciously realize that that’s absolutely not an excuse to go telling other people about them, it’s subversive enough that my brain somehow does so anyway, behind my metaphorical — metaphysical, I guess — back.

So I’ll realize later what an obnoxious, arrogant, unlikeable person I was, and flush with shame for a while. But this problem has plagued me forever: somehow I never learn to completely stop bragging. Grr. With ambition comes pride, perhaps? Dunno. Doesn’t seem like it has to be that way.

Anyway, it translates over to writing, as well. Most of the entries that I’m embarrassed about are ones that brag. And they’re worse than conversations, because LJ entries don’t automatically fade into the ether: they are physical manifestations of embarrassment, rather than just memories. Granted, I could change them — in fact, one of the “interesting entries” is a particularly egregious case — but a good part of me wants to grit my teeth and leave them there, to make sure that I don’t screw up again :).

I wonder if I’m alone in this whole phenomenon. Can’t be, right? Are you embarrassed by some of your older LJ entries? What do you do about it?

—–

Okay I’m not sure why I wrote all of that. It’s been bugging me for a while, though.

Some good news: the UConn victories are, amazingly, still sinking in. Occasionally I’ll just sit back and think, “Damn, wow, UConn really did win. Holy crap.” It doesn’t make any sense. But it does make me happy, and I’ll take that.

Also, my mom’s here for the week. She was nice enough to bring us some Indian sweets, Girl Scout cookies, and 2004 UConn National Championship shirts :). We have some fun activiites planned for the week (I took her to see the Nields yesterday, yay!) but I’ll probably write about all of that later. I hope she enjoys her stay!

—–

Chuck Klosterman is a writer for Spin Magazine whom I’ve liked for years. My officemate Dave happened to bring in a book of his essays that I’ve been meaning to read for a while, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, and I’ve been slowly working my way through it.

In some sense, Chuck writes the kind of stuff I want to write, if you took my ideal (writing and talking) style to the logical extreme: super-self-referential, filled with anecdotes and casual quasi-profundities that make you think and go “hmm” — but only for a moment — so that you’re set to read the next paragraph by the time you get to it.

Some of his observations are spot-on, while others fall flat (but usually in an amusing manner). (Apparently, I’m similar in this respect, too: “AJ has many theories,” Beth quite accurately deadpanned last week, “some of which are good.” [Is mentioning this bragging? Or self-effacing? I can’t figure out if I’m going to hate myself later or not.])

Anyway, it’s been a fun read. Some excerpts:

Click to read…

My brain spewed out some poetry (if you can call it that) in response to a piece of code I wrote.

The code:

    Black -> weight
  | Gray -> 0.
  | White -> begin
    weight <- List.fold_left (fun x y -> x +. do_one_edge y) freq outs ;
    float (weight_block edge.tob)
  end

You don’t have to know what it does; looking at the words might help though. In fact, I’m guessing the poem will make more sense if you stare at the code for a while.
(I’m proud of not taking advantage of the obvious “freak-outs”, btw. That was too low, even for me.)

—–
gray is worth nothing:
the cause, a digital universe
but life is not so terse

black is just weight: of expectations

white, though…
a relationship:
begins to (un)fold — lists, lusts, trysts,
        kissed
spite.
fight, might cite erstwhile delight
no? good night
(just like that,)
left to right
sounds like fun (x y)
do one?

hence

additions; confusions
frequent delusions
outs and ins
cardinal(ity) sins

floating edges
of gloating

end

Wow. The perfect season of basketball. There are a couple of sporting events that I would consider amazing: England winning the World Cup, say, or the Red Sox winning the World Series. But the events of the last few days have been even better.

(The UConn Huskies, my home state’s basketball teams, won both the men’s and women’s National Championships.)

Yes, I’m one of those insane sports fans. See, in Connecticut, we have no professional sports teams or any other interesting attractions. In fact, our largest city doesn’t even crack 150,000 people and (this is true) Hartford is enticingly known as the “Insurance Capital of the World”. There’s pretty much no reason for the rest of the country to think about Connecticut except to note (in an “I-think-I’m-funny”-but-actually-you’re-not way) that it occupies a couple of freeway exits between New York and Boston. The Huskies are all we’ve got, and it helps that both the men and the women kick serious ass. It’s practically a state religion: everyone watches them on TV when they play, and the two coaches are probably the two most famous people in Connecticut. The Huskies (both teams) really started getting good in the early 90s, my formative years, and I bought the obsession like a morbidly obese person buys gastric bypass surgery.

Luckily (or unluckily, for all those non-CT-natives who have to put up with me now), all my friends bought it too, so I’ve never felt weird reading every news story about UConn put out by every major paper I can (electronically) get my hands on, or realizing that I can recite not only the entire UConn roster, but also each player’s relevant offensive and defensive stats, his height and weight, and even his hometown.

So, yeah, this is about as good as it gets.

I’ve had some wonderful company while watching most of the tournament games, culminating in a terrific come-from-behind men’s semifinal victory over Duke on Saturday, replete with Cheeseboard pizza and ten-plus UConn fans (and, hmm, one sorry-ass Duke fan) crowded into our living room, going nuts as UConn performed its last minute heroics. Okay, I wouldn’t say that everyone was a UConn fan, per se, but everyone was at least a UConn supporter, and I’m hoping that I’ve made some new fans to help me out when next season comes around :).

The championship games were far more relaxed (although the company was still good!), mainly because the Huskies absolutely dominated.

It actually took a while to sink in — in fact, when the men won, I kind of just sat there like a lump of (inedible) play-doh, whereas when they won in ’99 I was on my knees in front of the TV — but sink in it has. Hooooooooooo!

Another good piece of news is that now that the tournaments are over, I don’t have to scour the web looking for articles about UConn, which means that I’ll have a couple more hours of free time each day :). A last tidbit from this article:

No Division I school has ever won the men’s and women’s basketball crowns in the same season.

After Diana Taurasi, the game’s Most Valuable Player, punted the ball high into the stands, Geno Auriemma said it best: “It’s mind-boggling.”

To put the feat in context, consider that there are 326 Division 1 schools and since 1999, UConn has won 6 of the 12 national titles. For those of you who are math-challenged, that’s half of those available. The women, who have won four of the five championships contested since the millennium, are a tidy 204-14 (.936). The men, who won their first in 1999, have gone 162-47 (.775) in those six seasons.

Together in that time, Geno Auriemma and Jim Calhoun have fashioned a ludicrous collective record of 366-61 (.857).

Anyway, there’s not much else to say. Work has been going pretty well, and the usual sports have been fun.

Oh yeah, I added some entries to the LJ “memories” thing… except that I eschewed actual memories, since those tend to be boring. Instead, I tried to pick entries that contain ideas, stories, or creations that I think other people might find interesting or entertaining, even if they don’t know me. So I guess they’re more like anti-memories. If you’re a new reader, you can peruse them here.

[edit: I had forgotten (until the language-nazi in me woke up) that “peruse” is one of those words that everyone (including me, it seems), unintentionally uses incorrectly. The colloquial definition of “peruse” is roughly “to skim” but in reality it means the opposite: “to examine carefully”. I still encourage you to peruse those anti-memories :).]

San and Beth are good about putting pictures in their entries, and it looks like I’ve snagged that habit off of them. Will keep it going for the time being…

In my previous entry I wondered whether I’ve ever stepped on any part of the planet that no human ever had before. I figured not (and the next day’s hiking, while lots of fun, was so rain-soaked that it allowed for no new opportunities) — but thinking back, I did a lot of off-trail hiking and climbing around Aspen (the cliff above was one of our conquests) with my friend Andrew over the course of several summers while I was growing up. Chances are I scored then. Woohoo!

The UConn men and women are both doing amazingly well. Both were two-seeds going into the tournament (ha!), but both have made it to the Final Four in dominant fashion. In fact, they’re doing so well that my paranoid fan-ness (cultivated by years of being a Red Sox, England, and Newcastle fan) suggests that a collapse before the end seems inevitable. The men play Duke, perhaps the most hated team in college basketball, on Saturday. I’m pumped!

Last week I got on Lee’s case for not updating his blog in almost a year (never mind not replying to my emails :). But then I went and reread his last entry, which included this snippet:

Foosball was a learning experience, as AJ dominated the ranks and also strove to emphasize the beauty and science of the game and to elevate our play.

In fact, I think that’s one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said about me. So in the interest of keeping that entry as his latest, I’ve decided to stop bugging him :).

I really wanted to write about tradition (at least from a naive, outsider’s point of view) but I haven’t quite solidified my thoughts yet. So instead I’ll talk about attractiveness.

Okay, first: yes, physical attractiveness is a superficial trait. But then again, so are other seemingly more respectable traits, such as intelligence and, to a lesser degree, sense of humor. (I do think that the way someone’s sense of humor manifests itself — the types of jokes he or she makes or laughs at — is telling.) Neither attractiveness nor intelligence says anything about the kind of person someone is: whether she’s trustworthy, kind, good-natured, generous, etc.

Now I’ll be the first to admit I’m a superficial guy: I like attractive, smart, funny women. But as I get older, it becomes more and more obvious that these traits alone do not a good relationship make. Still nice to have though!

I had a point here, but I don’t remember what it was… probably some attempt to rationalize why I always write about superficial things. Haha.

Anyway, now that I’ve cleared my conscience (phew! :), I can continue. The way I see it, there are three qualities that guys find physically attractive in women: cuteness, hotness, and beauty. Women can exhibit any combination of the three (or, possibly, all three at once!). No one quality is intrinsically valued higher than the other two, although I imagine different guys weight each of the three differently according to personal taste. Furthermore, possessing two or three of the qualities is not necessarily better than possessing just one. In short, I’d consider the metrics roughly orthogonal and thus not comparable.

I’ll give some examples:
Cute: Renee Zellweger
Hot: Carmen Electra
Beautiful: Nicole Kidman
Cute and hot: Britney Spears, Tara Reid
Cute and beautiful: Julianne Moore
Hot and beautiful: Liz Hurley

I don’t want to give any more examples because I fear that they (and even the ones I listed) might stir up controversy and obscure the underlying theory, which I think is quite sound :). However, if you mention any particular actress, it’s fairly easy to categorize her in any of the eight possible categories.