I've been bad

I need a week to sleep and sit around and waste my time reading and looking at the internet. And then maybe if I get tired of that I can go shopping and later watch E! True Hollywood Stories or something.
Going to work and school sucks! Stupid deadlines and exams... The only part of tomorrow I'm looking forward to is EPGY tutoring.
I need... motivation... a vacation... Keds corduroy slip-ons...

Wow!

So I was sitting around waiting for apple.com trailers to load, and I SOLVED my Microsoft rubik's cube! Don't ask me why I even have one (I really want the MatLab one sitting in lab, I might steal it), but I remembered that they were really hard to solve and I could get the first two "layers" but didn't even try the last one (in case you don't know about rubik's cubes, the picture ones are impossible because even though you can get all the pieces of a picture on one side, they'll be scrambled and won't form the picture).
I'm so freaking proud of myself right now--you have no idea what a boost this is to my nerd ego. My other, shopaholic ego is also content, since I got some awesome cute shoes today...
This is why I need to go to grad school. Because I'm such a terrible nerd that I don't think I can hang out with normal people anymore.

First side of the cube:


Second side:


I am soooo pleased with myself!


Yikes! Here's a more normal picture...


EDIT: Ok, I'm not quite as psyched now, because i just realized that if you do the first two layers right, the last one has to be right because there's no other way the pieces could fall into place. But it's still pretty cool, ok? And I still have new shoes, so everyone's happy.

Submitted!

Finally submitted my medical school application!

Just what you deserve

Maybe this is mean, but I was rooting for the marlin.
Sport fishing, hunting, and shooting people all amount to the same garbage, and it's stupid. Give me a hand-to-hand combat with a wild boar, and I'll say it's fair.

Dear Weather...

...It has been entirely too hot today. Apparently around my lab it was 107 degrees outside, the air conditioning and cooling systems for the computer clusters completely died, and the server rooms overheated (over 90 degrees, they said, which was bad). So all the machines got shut off and a job I had been running for two days got killed! Not to mention that it was just ungodly hot all day. Didn't do much but sit around (and fall asleep). Katherine went back home today, which was a bummer because it was nice to have someone around to encourage me to stay up later. Everyone in this house goes to sleep before midnight... it's like living in the old folk's home. I miss dorms!

So tonight I decided to embrace my nerdiness and went to see A Scanner Darkly with Hoff, Robert, Matt, and a bunch of Hoff's friends. It was playing at the Guild Theater in Menlo Park (which was surprisingly unghetto, despite sketchy appearances). The movie was awesome, trippy, and paranoid, and I took the most unattractive picture ever of Robert and Matt (and one of Hoff's friends, whose name I don't know... oops)



And the best part of the day had to be when Matt and I got back to my house and it was STILL so hot that we went SWIMMING at midnight! I mean, outside must have been about 75 or 80 degrees still, and the pool wasn't much colder. I didn't fully appreciate until now how awesome my pool is. Can't see it too much from the pictures, but it has rocks all around it like a "mountain lake" (cheesy, huh?) and the bottom lights up and everything.

You can't really see the lighted up bottom much in this picture:


This is more what it looked like, but here we look like freaks:


Two more pictures that are cool, from Katherine's birthday celebration (I gave her that camel, and Tracy gave her the funny cactus)




Rawr.

Newspapered room

Probably one of the best pranks ever. Stevie did this to Matt's room two years ago when they lived in Roble. You can't see it in the picture, but the lofted bed had furniture under it (speakers, a plant, and an armchair) that were also covered in paper.

Horsey!

Filling out my med school application, and this is making me feel better:



I suppose I like horses...

Need... sleep

I started working for EPGY again... I'm doing the intermediate programming course, which is all isolated in Hammarskjold (those CS kids are weird, best to isolate them, right?). This is definitely the best situation possible, since the other options were (1) Business, which I don't know anything about, (2) Math Olympiad, which I sort of know about, but not really, (3) Cosmology, which probably would have been fun, but ditto on the sort of not knowing anything about it.

Also, I have more pictures on my camera that I need to unload, so there might be pictures soon, but I'm just too lazy and tired. Between work, research, and trying to finish a 1,400 page novel that some idiot recalled from the library so I have to return it in a few days, I have more than enough on my hands.

I have another job!

Woohoo, I'm meeting with Rick Sommer tomorrow and I have a tutoring job!
I'm not going to be stuck doing business, either--I'm going to be doing some kind of math, either Math Olympiad Problem Solving or Geometry. I've never done drop-in tutoring for EPGY before and I have a suspicion that it's all the boring parts (like study hall) and none of the fun ones (like organizing afternoon activities). However, it'll be nice to be earnining some money on the side, and HOPEFULLY I'm going to turn in my medical school application in the next few days, so I'll have all the time in the world.

I get to travel again!

I'm going to another conference, the annual Department of Genetics retreat from September 20-22 in Monterey.
Scientific conferences are pretty exciting. You get put up in a nice hotel, have time to explore a random city with your labmates, plus it sort of counts like school since you're learning/presenting/going to talks. Plus they give you snacks. Not even kidding.

Me? Teach business?

So, as predicted, I got a ridiculously late e-mail from Rick Sommer, asking me to do drop in tutoring at EPGY. I would LOVE to (meet new people, do a fun job, make money so that I can blow it), but the problem is the course is in business, which I have no idea about. If it were up to me, all the businessmen could go jump off a huge office building and I wouldn't care. I'll probably end up e-mailing him back and telling him that I'd be willing to do it if he can't find anyone else, because I can definitely learn the stuff (finance and econ and such), and didn't I have to teach Java without knowing it?

Also, I'm going to a conference in San Diego on August 30th to September 1st on automated function prediction. I'm actually pretty excited because this is exactly what I work on, plus I get to hang out with Katherine after the conference and perhaps go to the flea market or wild animal park! So, um, you all should come down to San Diego also, to hang out with me and partake in general revelry and automated prediction of functional sites.

Oh, and I don't remember if I ever bragged about my awesome alpaca sweater that I found at the Salvation Army (actually, Matt found it, and I didn't want it until he made me try it on). I found an old picture of me wearing it, although I look a little frumpy.



I like it, although I'm bummed it's too hot for me to wear it now.

Staying up late

I'm really bad about staying up late. The past few days I've either been staying up until 2 or 3 in the morning (needlessly, too) or passing out when I get back from work because I only got 4 hours of sleep the night before. I need someone to call me every night at 12 (or at least IM me) and harass me until I go to bed. I'm serious!

Stupid Plug for apple.com

I can't believe I didn't discover this before, but the movie trailers page of apple.com is absolutely amazing! God help me, but I've watched every single trailer on that page (except the horror movie ones--I've got a whole wing of the house to myself, and I get freaked out easily). I desparately need a life.

By the way, who wants to go see the new Woody Allen movie with me?

Fake Duck

Chinese people are the kings and queens of vegetarian food, no joke. Most of the vegetarian dishes they make are really inventive and tasty, probably because they have so many buddhist feast thingies where meat isn't allowed and Chinese people aren't content to eat some gross tofu stir fry thing like our dining hall makes.

However, sometimes they take things too far.

Check this out: my mom bought this fake duck in a can and we had it with dinner one night. I've seen some "fake duck" stuff that vaguely resembled sliced, skinned duck, and was cooked in the same flavoring that duck is usually cooked in. This fake duck, though, really looked like duck.





The part that really gets me is the "skin." From far away, it looks really realistic. Also, as you can see from the second picture, the "skin" looks like it's a separate layer from the "meat."
Fortunately or unfortunately enough, this tasted nothing like duck. It tasted like almost every other vegetarian thing made of wheat gluten tasted like, only it was a bigger piece of it. Overall not that bad!

This is ridiculous

On the news today I saw that a girl gave birth to a baby in a WalMart--without even knowing she was pregnant! You can say all you want about "heart-warming" "miraculous" or whatever, but I would like to take the time to say: HOW OVERWEIGHT CAN YOU BE TO NOT KNOW YOU'RE PREGNANT?!?!?!?!??!
They interviewed the girl and she said "I had no idea--no morning sickness, no movement." However, MOST people know they're pregnant because they are carrying THIRTY extra pounds in their abdomen, not because they get morning sickness!
America, you gross me out sometimes.

By the way, I'm not that much of a terrible person: I hope this woman does well with her baby and all. It's just sort of weird.

Stupid phone

My phone is dying! Today a weird orange pixel showed up, then as the day progressed, it spread so now there's an orange spot on my screen, and it's getting bigger. I called Samsung customer service, and they said that IF the problem is under warranty (which runs out in less than a month), they can fix my phone but only if I send the phone to TEXAS where their service center is, and then it'll take them about THREE WEEKS to evaluate it, etc, not to mention shipping time which I will have to pay for. BOO! Stupid phone with problems! Tomorrow I'm going to the Cingular store, to see if I can't hassle something better out of them.

Fourth of July

For the 4th (actually, on the 1st, because it was a Saturday), I went with Mike to a company barbecue. What made it awesome, though, was that he works for ILM, part of Lucasfilm, so the barbecue was this massive event on Skywalker Ranch. The ranch was ridiculously pretty and well-kept, and I'm pretty jealous of this George Lucas guy.

So here's an idea of what it looked like (hopefully I'm allowed to post pictures like this?)

Pretty building, vinyard, and rolling hills. Pretty standard stuff, right?

Here's Mike in front of this lake, which apparently is called "Ewok Lake." Like, you know, Star Wars and all that, right?... I think that's a little cheesy, but whatever.




They had an ice cream truck! Actually, they had a ton of food, too bad I wasn't in a "hungry" mood (although I DID eat some awesome potato salad, for which I braved almost certain food poisoning)


animalitos!



This goat was awesome. He was like "arrrrr, food!"

The man himself! Ha ha, we kept trying to take clandestine pictures of George Lucas by posing to the side of where he was and pretending to take pictures of ourselves. Unfortunately the only one I could get was this one of his back (he's in the plaid shirt).


Actually, people were pretty good about acting normal around him. This picnic was for employees (and guests) only, and apparently everyone's bosses were terribly clear about how no one was allowed to do anything stupid like ask him for autographs, etc. It was pretty funny because people were still swarming around him & he was obviously the center of attention, while everyone was sort of pretending to act like they didn't think he was too much of a big deal.

The next day (Sunday) I got to see Angela! That was exciting, she had just got back from England + a ridiculous world tour. Monday I left work early and took a three and a half hour nap, which, Matt pointed out, is more than half of the sleep I get on a normal night. Yes, I know I don't sleep enough, but whatever. Tuesday I went on a 7 mile hike around Windy Hill. Wednesday and today have been boring and uneventful. I keep falling asleep in lab.

I like to post pictures!

More random pictures from Humboldt:

Sally, Patrick's awesome dog. She's the sweetest dog that ever existed (although this time I came up she was shedding chunks of hair everywhere).


"Wheee!"


"Blehuhbluhhhh!!"