Merry Post Christmas

Hey all,

I hope you all had a merry christmas! I managed to after some initial difficulties. I managed to make it home without too many difficulties after my last blog post, and after another trip to the hospital for abdominal pain on the 24th I started feeling better. I even managed enough of a recovery to join my mom & brother for a trip up to a family friend's house for Christmas Eve dinner!

Overall, the trip home was pretty awesome. I got to spend time with all of my family, have a few great meals (prime rib with Dad on Christmas, hand-made perogi with Mom on Boxing Day), exchange gifts, and even bought myself a fancy new coat from Macys! I'm actually really really excited about the coat, to the point where I've posted a picture of myself in it at the end of this post. I've been meaning to buy one like it for a long time, and I got it for 50% off! This was partially aided by signing up for a Macy's credit card in the store, which I am hoping to pay off and cancel as soon as possible. We shall see if I get bitten in the ass for trying to get another 15% off my coat...

Who out there watches "The Big Bang Theory"? If you are unfamiliar with the show, the basic premise is 4 nerds + 1 hot non-nerd girl who moves in next door + various misadventures. I think it is *hilarious*, if occasionally painfully familiar to watch. My brother gave me season 1 on DVD for christmas (^_^), and I am currently trying to catch up on season 2. The one thing that has struck me about the show as of late is how *very* well, if somewhat eclectically, dressed all of the "nerd" characters are. Apparently even super-nerdy characters that have their lack of social graces played up as a central piece of the show nonetheless maintain immaculate grooming. It is like the classic 'teen transformation' movie where the ugly and unpopular kid suddenly becomes gorgeous and popular with the right haircut and wardrobe adjustments. Hollywood seems to tell us that your social zenith lies no further away than the hairdresser and mall. I think that 'ugly' people on TV are just beautiful people that people treat as ugly. Opinions? Discussion? Do I even have people reading this?

Lets see, almost done with this post. I just wanted to mention that I finished reading "Hyperion" by Dan Simmons. I've actually read it before, years ago, but I'm trying to read "Fall of Hyperion", which I checked out from the library, and it was too confusing without re-reading "Hyperion" again first. I'm glad I did. The first time I read the book I was *really* confused, probably because I read it quickly, skimming parts, instead of really paying attention and figuring out what was going on. One of the most interesting parts of the book is that it is told in the style of Canterbury Tales. A group of pilgrims are on a journey to a strange beast known as "The Shrike" (or, to members of the Shrike church, "The Lord of Pain". Its not exactly a cuddly sort of book...). Through their journey the each relate their stories and how Hyperion (the world the Shrike inhabits) has intertwined itself with their lives. Even beyond this interesting literary device, the book manages to combine mystery, suspense, and even a bit of existential philosophy. Dan Simmons deifies the English poet John Keats, making him a central piece of the book (did I mention it is 700 years in the future?) and spends a lot of time exploring the possibly consequences of a sentient AI and the sort of technological singularity that you hear people talking about w.r.t the Internet now and again. All in all, I recommend the book. Make sure you have the sequel available to you though. Hyperion is a cliff hanger.

Thats all for now!

Cheers,
Jason

There is a party in my stomach and I wasn't invited...

Ugh. I've been having stomach pain since Sunday and took a sick day today to go into the Stanford Medical Clinic ER. After some lab work and an ultrasound the conclusion is that I just have a badly upset stomach (yay! I don't have to have surgery!). As wonderful of news as this is, my stomach still really doesn't feel good... So, I'm going to attempt to drive home today and have my family take care of miserable me. Wish me luck with the 6 hour drive.

On the work front, I'm *finally* making progress on my current project at work and *really* would like to finish it up. I also had a bit of an adventure on Friday. Normally I wake up at 7:23AM, get ready, bike a mile to the train station, catch the 8:23AM train, and bike from the train station in SF to get to work at ~9:15AM. On Friday things were going wonderfully normally, until I got on the train and realized that I had forgotten my wallet.

Now, as Caltrain so gleefully reminds you a dozen times a day, Caltrain requires you to have the ticket to be on the train and if you don't have one you get hit with a hefty fine. My monthly pass is safely contained in my wallet, where I am least likely to misplace it. Unfortunately, that doesn't really help when you misplace your wallet.

I found a conductor and asked her what to do. She told me to get off the train. So I did, at the next stop. But this is an *express* train, so the next stop was 6 miles from my house (and that is me being luck, a different express train would have dropped me way farther down the line). Having no money to buy myself a ticket, I biked home along somewhat soggy roads and switched to my trusty automobile to convey me to work. 45 minutes and a wrong turn on the 280 later, I finally made it to work a little after 10. And I was still one of the first engineers there.

The happy epilogue to all of this is that I used my car (which I don't normally have up in SF) to visit Doug over in Berkeley after work. It was great to see him, hang out, and try another delicious beer ^_^.

The only other recent news is that I went up to a party Jen DuMond threw up at her parents lodge in the nearby mountains. I carpooled up with Shelley, and after *lots* of being lost on dark, damp, and dangerous mountain roads we finally found the place (a little over an hour late). There were a few other Mudders there and it was generally an awesome time!

Thats all for now. I want my stomach to feel better :-P

Merry Christmas,
Jason

A Plott Filled Weekend

Hey all,

At the gentle and vauguely parseable nudgings of one of my few readers, I will one again endeavor update all y'all as to what has been happening in my spectacularly exciting life over the last week.

The major exciting news is that Sean came up to visit this weekend, hence the title of the post. He arrive at our house Saturday evening and the lot of us (Sean, Mike, Morgan, and Myself [yes, I deserve the capital]) drove up to San Francisco to meet up with Andy, Angela, and Kevin. After navigating the heavy Saturday-evening traffic and being chased through SF streets by bone-chilling winds, my trusty iPhone and I led the group to the "Hong Kong Clay Pot" restaurant, one of the best recommended restaurants in Chinatown (according to Yelp!). We had a massive and delicious meal there (yay for honey-glazed prawns ^_^) and then navigated our way back to transportation through hordes of drunken Santas (actually, they may have been high. Andy, Angela, and Kevin ran into a gigantic Santa-rave that stank of pot before we arrived [No, I am not shitting you. Angela got it on video.]).

Through a series of unbelievably complicated steps that I will not bore you with, all of us (plus Tracy! ^_^) ended up at Angela & Andy's apartment. Once there we hung out, drank a bit, and in general had a nice little Mudd get together ^_^. I love how many Mudders ended up here.

We left at 1:30, and got home sometime around 3 (where we had a delicious midnight snack of dumplings and then collapsed). Sunday was a bit less eventful. Morgan when out to tide pools (he actually manged to wake up at 9:30am after being up till 3... :-P), Mike did stuff with his dad all day, and I hung out at home with Sean. This largely involved lots of watching Go, and me trying and failing to play Fallout 3 & Rock Band because they felt like too much work. We eventually went out for Thai food and I managed to start Mass Effect, which is the first fun-feeling RPG I've played in a long-long time (though I think the interface kind of sucks). I also realized that I miss Super Smash Brothers Melee. I think I need a gamecube, and to live closer to Joe...

The other exciting thing this weekend was a Rock Band party after work on Friday where I got to show off my (somewhat rusty) fake guitar skills while drinking Chimay and whiskey-spiked Nog, and then actually have Jack as company on the train down to Palo Alto ^_^. (Work in SF + Home in Palo Alto => at least 2 hrs of commute/day).

The benefit of my long commute, however, is that I get to read on the train. I used to read for hours ever day before college, and it is really wonderful to be reading again! I will try to keep a log of what books I've recently finished along with this blog. Speaking of which: I just finished "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell. The general premise of the book is that we as humans have an incredible capacity to make very complicated decisions very quickly with very little information. Gladwell tries to persuade the reader of this and then explore the character of this ability (particularly its pitfalls) and how it can be trained and guided. I definitely thought it was a good read, though he can be a bit causal with the conclusions he draws.

To give an example of a conclusion that I thought was hasty, Gladwell uses the statistic that an *very* abnormally high portion of CEOs are far above average height (50% are > 6', 33% are > 6'2") to conclude that people have an unconcious bias to consider tall people in a more positive light. This effect has actually been documented to some degree, but I don't buy Gladwell's conclusion. First, he doesn't give any underlying reason for why this preference should exist (the only one that I can think of is some evolutionary bias, but that smells of BS). Second, I've read Freakenomics, which talks about exactly the same effect (tall people in aggregate have higher earnings are are more successful than their shorter counterparts). However, Freakenomics looks more closely at the data and points out a study that found that that correlation only exists for people that were tall in early high school. The explanation floated is that if you are tall early then you are more likely to have more self confidence, which is much more believably associated strongly with success.

Nit-picky objections aside, I thought Blink was a good book and worth my time to read. If anyone has good economics/sociology/psychology books, please recommend them to me. I'm getting very interested in econometrics, social psychology, and similar subjects but really have no background in them.

Next book to read: "All Tomorrow's Parties" by William Gibson

One last thing: Sean's visit was awesome. It was *fantastic* to have him up here, even for so short a time. And it was *no* trouble to us. What this means is that all of you should come and visit us whenever you feel like it (or more frequently than that even. We will compensate your overexposure with free bedding and food). We like visitors. Make us happy! ^_^

Cheers,
Jason

A post, finally!

Hey all,

At long last I am starting to blog again. I've been stuck on the front page of blogger for two weeks lazily trying to pick a title for my blog. I feel like I'm wandering through this funny thing called life these days, trying to see where I'm headed, so I finally decided that "Wanderings" makes a decent enough name.

For those who happen to start reading this but I haven't talked to in a while, I am living with Morgan Conbere & Mike Tauraso (fellow HMC '08-ers) in Menlo Park, CA and working for Yelp (check it out! www.yelp.com) up in San Francisco as part of their search team.

I'm sure I will write a more inspired post at some point, but for now I have overwhelmed myself with the amazing accomplishment of having started a blog. I don't want to strain myself too much, so I'm going to sign off for now.

Cheers,
Jason