Breathless summary of recent events of or relating to Southern California and marriage

I promised Annie a shout-out in honor of her getting married, so (belatedly), Hi Annie! Congrats! She was quite the radiant bride, and the wedding had numerous highlights, including but not limited to

• the bartender giving me a bottle of Curvoisier to take back to my table
  
• Annie's brother-in-law explaining how getting married was choosing a life of "ennobling pain"
  
• this Newlywed Game-ish quiz about who does what in their relationship
  

Wes also did a great job showing me around LA - we went to the Dali exhibit (that man was obsessed with ants), had tasty Italian food, shopped for a couch, went to Trader Joe's for panini ingredients, ate at a pancake place that his friend saw Turk from Scrubs at twice, and went to a tea bar showing football games with scantily-clad waitresses. I guess I should actually thank Yelp, which is where Wes's roommate-to-be found most of these places.

While I was in SoCal, I also got to catch up with Jen, Robin, Vince, Albert, Yaz, Jenn, Judy, Kathy, Richard, and Charles. So many people! Other than the fact that everybody's getting engaged (congrats Yaz and Robin!) or in relationships, the most important thing is that we need to convince Vince to recapture his dream to start a business.

I also spent a lot of time in traffic. How do people put up with that?

Speaking of Southern California - my family was evacuated but is now back home. Thanks to everyone who was checking in - I felt very loved!

Personal space

Apropos of almost nothing*, I was thinking about how it is that although my first first kiss definitely occurred when I was sober, pretty much every other first kiss since then has not. The idea that I could ever brashly invade someone's personal space like that without some sort of lubrication seems pretty absurd.** Who knew that girls would actually get more intimidating as I got older?

*I could try to argue the fact that the rental company's smallest car on Monday was a Ford Mustang is a symptom of some deep-seated American need for a maximal radius of inviolability, but I'm not going to play that card.

**The exception to this is of course the oh-right-you're-one-of-those-girls-who-hugs-goodbye goodbye hugs. These are simultaneously awkward and pleasant, but still less awkward than the goodbye handshake with another guy, especially a good friend (When did our personal friendships start to so closely resemble business acquaintanceships? "Thanks for hanging out"? Foolishness.) that turns into a half-handshake half-hug with manly back-patting after a confusing are-we-going-shake-hands-or-hug-i-mean-we're-really-good-friends-we-should-probably-hug-right(?) moment.

Wine after Wine Index

(For those of you not in the know, Wine after Wine was my dubiously-conceived high-school/wine-party mashup. You can judge the results for yourself.)

Bottles of wine consumed: 18.25 (2 malbecs, 2 cabernets, 2 rieslings, 2 shirazes, 1 sangioevese, 1 moscato d'asti, 1 merlot, 1 pinot noir, 1 haute-medoc, 1 montepulciano, 3 random spanish/portugese reds, 1 random spanish white, part of a bottle of port)

Corkscrews mangled: 2
Corks mangled: 3
Corkscrews purchased mid-party: 1

Fraction of Kushal's party playlist deemed inappropriate for parties: 1/4
Cyndi Lauper songs on said playlist: 2

Ratio at which table salt should be substituted for kosher salt: .5
Approximate number of masa tots made with a substitution ratio of 1: 60
Number consumed: 20

Avocados consumed in guac form: 3



Discussions about whether Tom is grabbing Lisa's breast in their save-the-date manget: 3

High school yearbooks analyzed: 1

Viewings of Can't Hardly Wait: 1

Failed attempts by Larry to put his name tag on his wine: 3

Overheard in Taboo

Craig: Shift-6 on a keyboard. Shift 6!
Crowd: Percent? Dollar?
Craig: You can eat it.
Michael: Hash?
Akshay: Colon?

In other news from the Google ski trip, I can almost kinda sorta turn now.

How to find long-lost people?

So, I'm trying to track down this long-lost (for various complicated reasons) cousin of mine, Tina Thakar, who I know married a Michael Vaulter and settled down in San Francisco before we really lost track of her. I noticed that she was on classmates.com and laid down $40, but the email address they have must no longer be valid. There isn't anything promising in any of the online phone books. Anybody know of other ways of tracking people down? (Then again, maybe she doesn't want to be found...)

Hehe

And you thought your job was boring?

Back again

So, just as I was about to write a blog entry describing how Feedster came through with Janet Jackson pictures way before the big engines could catch up with it, coupled with a rant about how a network whose leading shows are rife with violence and allusions to sex and even purport to present "reality" had turned out to be just as hypocritically and capriciously Puritanical and superstitious as the next American, I found out our server had been hacked. Grr. I think I would rather have a car stolen than have my data messed with. It's just disruptive and scary. Anyway, things are back to normal (yay Richard!).

Since then, not too much has happened. I finally saw 28 Days Later (scary!) and watched Miracle (fun, simple!) with Wes (happy birthday wes!). I also made Valentine's Day reservations with the help of Open Table. What a cool service. It'd be nice if they linked straight to menus, though, since it took a while to figure out which restaurants (many of them!) didn't have vegetarian options, especially on their prix fixe menus.

I'm now on Orkut. Come find me. It's already proven quite valuable. I found out that Anna has been signed for many more episodes on O.C. and I found a really interesting list of collaboratively filtered web surfing experiments.

Back!

I'm back home from Lotusphere, and it's time to put my life back in order and catch up on sleep (I'm particularly sad about the hours lost before realizing Zone Labs was secretly keeping me from copying files to the server's Windows share). Donuts got mentioned in a blog and another blog and then in Ed Brill's blog, which is neat. People liked the demo, and the conference as a whole was impressive...I met lots of interesting Lotus people and enthusiastic customers. If I had watched the opening session from the main hall, I could have said I'd seen Patrick Stewart, but oh well.

The trip's trappings were less stellar...Universal Studios Florida was pretty cheesy; Song was nothing special; the hotel (Disney's Dolphin "Resort") was shockingly expensive considering the crying baby next door, the missing cue ball on the pool table, the $2 cans of soda, the missing remote control, the erroneous mini bar billing, the 2 mile road "running trail," the dim flourescent lighting...the only good thing was Ethernet in the rooms, and even that ran out of bandwidth. Adding insult to injury, it was the coldest Florida's gotten in some time while we were there (though it was quite funny to see people wearing scarves and gloves in 40 degree weather). I also had forgotten how vegetarian-unfriendly Florida was.

But it was warm enough to go running outside (the one day I managed to wake up early enough!) and there were a few fun places near the hotel to grab drinks. Overall, very fun, but it's good to be back.

Yeah, yeah

So I've been neglecting my blog. It happens to everybody, right? Not entirely sure why. Part of it is probably hanging out with Catherine (we saw Urinetown (cute, catchy music, weird ending) on Saturday and then went to Finale (half hour wait and a little pricey, but worth it...mmm) and last weekend we saw Big Fish (sweet, entertaining) and ate hot pot). I've also been busy getting a demo ready for Lotusphere (although I think last week would really have been the ideal time to be in Florida). Hmm, what else have I been up to? Friday, Abe and I played laser tag, which was fun, although the high schoolers demolished me. I'm also still working on my Warcraft skills. In any case, I'm off to the grocery store now.

Gar, why am I still awake?

I guess this time I can blame it on jet lag. I'm still adjusting after a fun-filled vacation in (an admittedly rainy) San Diego. Chargers game, disc golf, climbing, running, bowling, basketball, chilling, Lord of the Rings, the Ali G movie, Matrix Reloaded (finally), Mexican food, chain restaurants, pizza, video games, Legos, chess (haha, Paresh!), Scrabble (damn you, Eric!), poker, shopping, friends, babies, wives. Who knew San Diego could be such fun?

Fun with match.com data

After Martin noticed this article about dating preferences in Yahoo!'s most popular articles, I browsed my way over to match.com's PR site, which informs us that "Although only 43% of singles said they are confident they will start off 2004 with a romantic midnight kiss (with men being more confident of this than women), singles are united in their desire to be kissed gently..." The research area is also pretty interesting.

(On semi-related notes, check out this interesting use of the Amazon API to measure subject popularity and the Times articles linked from the recently updated Metabuzz.)

Why don't they teach you anything this useful in DARE?

Who knew that too much sugar with your liqour makes you sick?

"The sugar load is very problematic because it is very hard for the liver to metabolize a lot of sugar and alcohol at the same time," he said. "Of course, people are drinking more, with all these terror alerts going around. So I tell my patients to be pre-emptive. Drink a lot of water and take a Tylenol before you go out."

Whither Thinkquest?

So, I was looking through the Thinkquest site since my brother was thinking of participating, and I'm left wondering what happened to the poor thing. It's now run by Oracle, the big scholarship prizes are gone, and the whole thing seems to have a little more corporate feel to it than it used to.

On the other hand, it is nice to see that the library is well groomed, with nice descriptions of each entry. And it is good that the thing is still going on. I need to go back and clean out the vulgar comments put into the discussion boards we had in our entires. Teachers keep writing to complain that they can't link to the sites because of all of the crap people have written into them....I wish I had though to build more robust maintenance tools into it, but I always underestimate the number of stupid and immature people on the Internet.

I also took a look at the most recent grand prize winner, which actually has some fun little applets on it. The quiz says I'm 61% left brained and 57% visual.

Amazon to the rescue

I swear I keep finding more interesting things on Amazon's guides and lists every time I look. This time, when Googling ideas for present ideas for an 11-year-old girl (who Suzie paired me with through Operation Santa), I found this and this. Fascinating. Maybe someday Amazon will just pick presents out automatically. I'd pay for that. ;-)

Random culture consumption update

I finally finished American Pastoral. It's a bit on the depressing side. Certainly makes one not want to have kids. (And it is nice to know I wasn't alone in thinking that certain parts dragged. ) I do love Roth, though. He's just so...right. Now to mentally answer the questions in this discussion guide....

Also saw the Matrix in IMAX at the Aquarium. It was better than I'd been lead to believe, although I imagine it would have made more sense if I had bothered to see Reloaded. The IMAXness was fun but not as mind-blowing as I'd hoped...the screen is big and ultra-clear and the sound is good.

Last weekend, saw Last Samurai, which was not as good as the reviews said, though entertaining.

I really need LoTR to come out...it's time for a quality movie.

Wow

For anybody who missed it (bad you!) Remail was on Slashdot. Pretty neat. The feedback is surprisingly heartening.

Awesome

Eyeglasses.com has the feature I've always wanted from glasses shopping....virtual trying-on! Actually, I've always thought a regular store could do the real thing with a digital camera and a screen, but virtually placing the frames is extra efficient.... Now to find a picture I can try this out with.

New headphones

So, I ordered Shure e2c headphones after my third pair of Sony MDR-A35s in as many years had one ear stop working when the cord got yanked. I'm a little wary about owning a $99 pair of headphones, especially for running (we are talking, after all, about the guy who broke 2 minidisc players and an mp3 player in the past 5 years), and the noise blocking seems to verge on dangerous for running on streets (assuming, of course, my knees are ever up to it again). Maybe I'll get another set of Sony's for running, but recommendations on iPod lounge and Joi Ito's blog (which turned into a fascinating impromptu customer relations forum) have me pretty convinced. Score one for decentralized product reviews....where's my review search engine when I need it? I'll report back on how they work once they turn up. (And Shure turns out to be very good at responding to private queries, too: when I asked about the sweat tolerance of the e2cs via email, they wrote back the next morning explaining "the E2C earphone has been tested extensively in environments where the product is exposed to sweat for extended periods of time. Workout
conditions are actually very similar to live performance conditions.")

Speaking of distributed reviews, Seb points to work on a format for marking up reviews in RSS.

Why I woke up before 8 on a Saturday

I woke up early Saturday to attend the attend day 2 of the Multiples of 1 conference, and it was well worth it. What a cool conference, although it's sort of tough to describe what it was about. A recurring theme was the difficulty and power of creating an open platform that allows for unexpected uses while providing sufficient constraints. Perspectives included the way conflicts were resolved in the Linux kernel, how Zipcar maintains order with minimal rules, the relationships between people and their electronic devices, how collaborative tools are often subsconsciously effective, how workplaces are changing physically, how wireless networks can scale indefinitely with a cooperative design, how markets are just one way of exchanging data.

For my adoring fans...

...who were kept in suspense during my authorial delinquency, I ended up being an iPod for Halloween. I printed out big versions of the controls, display and Apple logo and pasted them on not-too-big pieces of posterboard and hung em over my shoulders. It received rave reviews. And some mockery. One person thought I was a condom, but he might have been drunk. Sadly, there are no pictures, but needless to say, it was not as elaborate as this.