March 2005 Archives

Oklahoma: Well, the people are very nice. I'm not sure they're used to our east coast mentality. My boss and I were at an italian restaurant in Oklahoma Cities and had just ordered, when my boss got an "emergency" email on his blackberry and had to spend the entire meal talking on his bluetooth headset in a corner of the restaurant. Well, I wasn't going to just sit there and eat alone (while his food got cold), so I pulled out my Treo and talked to Chicklet. My boss got back to the table just in time to ask the waitress to give us the check and pack up his entire meal :) ... she was very understanding, but it seemed that not too many Okies from Muskogee try to pull that.

Speaking of Okies from Muskogee, I finally heard that song and I must say I was slightly offended. What? We don't wave American flags in courthouses on the coasts?! Sure, you don't do LSD or light up, but you get drunk off your arses from "white lightning!" Please. Get over yourselves.

Friday I played Settlers of Catan with Nick and Sean. You may recall that last time we played I went 1-1. The outcome was the same this time as well. (If not for a stupid, stupid move on my second turn of game #2 I would have gone 2-0.)

This weekend I got over a small cold (it was nothing to sneeze at). Also, Chu and I started work on my TiVo, which consisted of putting lots of little connectors into the right pin. It was high school microelectronics all over again. Now the motherboard is connected to the case, so today I ordered a hard drive, CD/DVD-burner, memory, and TV tuner. I also started the bit torrent for the OS (though I'm still deciding between KnoppMyth and Fedora...suggestions?).

On Sunday, I attended my first Easter party. With no clue what traditional vegetarian Easter food is, I decided to bring some Charoset--traditional Passover food. It wasn't my best batch, but people liked it (it's hard to go wrong with Charoset). And I used my honed Afikomen-finding skills to locate four of the nine eggs hidden throughout Miranda's living room. I didn't partake in egg-dyeing: I figured egg-hunting made me a good enough Pagan.

NCAA update: I plummeted to the 59th percetile in ESPN's challenge. But, while I'm out of the running in my office pool, I'm still in the running in the family pool and am 6th out of 88 in the large Capital One office pool (I know someone who works there). Thus, if Louisville beats Michigan St. in the national championship (assuming they beat Illinois and UNC, respectively), then I win $25 in the Strauss pool and have a really good shot at $250 in the Capital One pool. A longshot with those teams, I know, but something to root for.

Tomorrow I leave for a east coast road trip (this time with a new SmartTag card: yay!). The agenda is Princeton, NJ (Wed.)->Columbia in NYC (Thur.)->Yale (Thur., Fri.)->MIT (Fri., Sat.)->NYC again (Sat., Sun.)->home for a friend's birthday party on Sunday. Hopefully, I'll be able to report in at least once on the trip.

Even with the Kansas loss mentioned below, my NCAA picks for the first two rounds weren't bad at all. I'm winning the Mellman Group office pool, running in the 98th percentile in ESPN, and moving up in the all-important family pool. My later picks are such that I'm not expecting to win the office pool, but if Louisville goes deep I'll almost certainly finish in the money in the Strauss pool. Fly, Cardinal, fly!

I got back from U of M on Saturday night, just in time to attend Jenna's birthday party at the Casablanca restaurant. There we were served delicious Moroccan food and entertained by belly dancers. Later, with the staff playing "Happy Birthday" as impetus, Jenna showed off her belly dancing skills on the floor. (She had taken a few classes.) As the group was working out the bill, Jenna gave me a quick lesson, which had the desired comedic effect on those observing. It was just a restaurant full of people watching me make a fool of myself: nothing too unusual.

Sunday, with Chu's help, I actually had a meal at home (stuffed portobello mushrooms--yummy). But now I'm traveling again--I'll be in this great flat state of Oklahoma until Thursday. You really can't find vegetarian food in here--I ordered a house salad and it came with bacon on it. My cab driver from the airport was taken aback by my diet: "Even turkey, too?" he asked incredulously. (Supposedly Tulsa, my destination Wednesday, is more forgiving to us herbivores.)

But, as long as I avoid the tornadoes everything should be fine.

Bucknell?! Where the heck is Bucknell?! I've barely even heard of them! And their mascot: what is that even supposed to be?! Damn them. My bracket is ruined...after the second day!

While I have a decent 65 percentile in the ESPN challenge after Kansas' loss to now-you-know-who, my chances in the Strauss family pool (which is the only thing I really care about) are now almost nil. I can barely remember when I've had one of my five teams go out in the first round, but certainly when it's happened, the early-losing team has been in my "safety" region (i.e., one region that comprises two of my teams). See, this is what I get for working in a real job and having less time to watch college basketball. ARGHHGHHcjckjsd;ljodif!

Oh, and yeah, UMich is a pretty nice campus, too.

Between focus groups in Philadelphia (Monday) and Baltimore (Tuesday), West Wing night yesterday, visiting the University of Michigan over the next two days, Jenna's party on Saturday, and Oklahoma focus groups next week, I almost would have gone 11 days without dinner at home. Thankfully, this Sunday should include a nice, home cooked meal with fun company.

Right now I'm in Ann Arbor, watching the NCAAs on a large flat-screen TV at my host's apartment. If you can rent a pad like this one on grad student salary, I should seriously consider Michigan. I'm visiting during the "Open House" for prospective PhD Poli Sci students, so they've pretty well filled my schedule tomorrow (breakfast at 8:30--yuck).

Back to the NCAAs, as last year, the rules of my family's pool are that you have to pick five teams whose sum of seeds is at least 12. The person with the most total wins at the end of the tourney is the victor. First through fourth win dollar amount and fifth wins center ice seats at the 2005 Stanley Cup :). My picks are: Illinois (1), Duke (1), Kansas (3), Oklahoma (3), and Louisville (4). So far Oklahoma has won, and Illinois is about to advance.

Thursday, CH and I went to Politics and Prose, where Jennifer Gordon was reading from and aswering questions about her book, Suburban Sweatshops. C-Span was there (I presume for Book TV, on the deuce) and being the media whore I am, I stepped up and asked a question. Ms Gordon, unfortunately, decided she didn't want to answer my query and gave an surprisingly vague and uninformative response. I'm keeping an eye out on c-span.org to see when it'll be on.

After perusing the book store we went to Sala Thai to "Dine Out for Life." The food was above average. But it couldn't beat the mint, peanut butter, chocolate chip, oreo(TM) cookie, and almond ice cream that we concocted at Cold Stone.

Friday night I stayed late at work and crashed when I got home (not everyday can be exciting). Saturday was more entertaining. I went to services at Adat Shalom, a reconstructionist synagogue in Maryland. The 17-year-old boy (a guest of the bar mitzvah kid, I assume) laughed at the (flaming) gay rabbi for about the first third of the service. I wanted to reach over and throttle the kid. Hashem got revenge on the father (for raising such a son, I presume) later in the service...but the story doesn't translate well into text: you'll have to call if you're curious.

Later that afternoon we went to Puzzle Freak, in search of a good jigsaw puzzle. The first clue something was wrong was that the woman behind the counter asked if we were older than 21, and when I replied in the affirmative, informed us that there was a "back section." Turns out that the puzzles were just a front for a porn store! True to its name, the store did have puzzles, though the emphasis was really on the latter word in "Puzzle Freak." We bought a 3-D puzzle of the Earth, which we started to piece together while consuming some chewie Wookie Cookies ([insert reader's groooooan here]).

Today I went with a co-worker to the Intel STS public presentation of the 40 finalists' projects. In a sentence: I felt dumb. Turns out that I had forgotten much of theoretical computer science. After I accessed the science/math part of my brain, not too many of the projects were mind-blowing. Most added a small (and sometimes unneccesary) piece to a narrow and complex field--usually whatever their mentor was working on. The best project that I both saw and understood was an approximation algorithm to solve a (useful) variant of the traveling salesman problem.

Last night was a Mellman Group poker night, and I played poker the best way I know how: playing with someone else's money. I spotted a coworker the $20 buy-in fee and played some of her hands while she finished up work. She was a newbie at poker, so I helped her learn the game; in fact, she finished the night 75 cents up. (I didn't play myself since I had to leave early for West Wing night--and because I don't like losing money.)

Some links if you're bored at work:

Copying from the Star Wars cookbook, McSweeny's posted a list of "Names of Cheeses Inspired by Star Wars Characters." (Thanks to Jen for the link.)

Also for your amusement:Natalie Imbruglia mime (Disclaimer: sexual innuendo included.)

More seriously: Food and Friends is sponsoring Dining Out For Life tonight. Go out to dinner tonight at a participating restaurant and your money will go toward a good cause.

When I was a kid, my Mom had in her study the largest book I had ever seen: the Merriam-Webster unabridged dictionary. I remember the spine being about 8 inches long, but since I was smaller back then my scale might be skewed. The dust jacket was blue, with a white circular logo on the cover and the usefulness of the book was evident in the jacket's wear and tear. I haven't seen the book in years, and I'm not even sure if my Mom still has it, but today it came in handy.

Not the actual physical book, of course, but the online version. This morning, I received an email with the word "miscreance" in it. When I replied and clicked on GMail's "check spelling" feature, miscreance was highlighted as an incorrect word. Immediately, I tried googling for miscreance; the lack of a link in the upper-right hand corner led me to think that the email sender made up a word. But, as a last attempt, I tried dictionary.com. Lo and behold, miscreance is actually a word:

Miscreance

\Mis"cre*ance\, Miscreancy \Mis"cre*an*cy\, n. [OF. mescreance, F. m['e]cr['e]ance incredulity.] The quality of being miscreant; adherence to a false religion; false faith. [Obs.] --Ayliffe.

Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.

Being the game-player that I am, the first thing I noticed is that Miscreance is capitalized (and thus not a valid Scrabble play), but didn't seem like a proper noun. Then I read the source, and saw that the unabridged dictionary provided me with the definition.

But then I wondered, now in the digital age, what's the point of having two different dictionaries? Either an array of letters is a word or it isn't. (Though some of my PoMo friends might disagree with me on that point.) An online unabridged dictionary is just as user-friendly and uses only marginally more resources than an abridged version. People don't surf their way to unabridgeddictionary.com when dictionary.com doesn't suffice. Potentially the only hope for the term "unabridged dictionary" is that Merriam Webster continues to (try to) make money off this antiquated concept.

Perhaps I'll ask my Mom to keep her copy of the great big, blue reference book around so one day I can show my kids what the world was like before terabytes were sold at the corner store.

I started the weekend off with contradancing. Counter to coworker's prediction, there were more boys than girls in our group. The dance was held in Glen Echo Park, and over 200 dancers attended (with the gender ratio about even). To oversimplify for the uninitiated, contradancing is a more active type square dancing. A set of calls (or instructions) is repeated continuously throughout one "dance," thus there is no need to call past about the third iteration.Unfortunately, the dance hall becomes very hot very quickly--next time I'll remember to bring extra layers (to replace sweaty articles of clothing).

I joined up with old high school friends (including enjanerd and itp) after dancing. It turns out that a pal I hadn't seen in years now lives right next to me in Crystal City. Becca successfully balanced a quarter on the edge of a beer glass with the help of two forks. Jenna then tried to show her up by balancing the salt shaker on its edge--failing miserably in the process. We stayed at a local diner until 3:30am, when my stomach finally shut off. (For the first time in my life I couldn't finish a vanilla milkshake.)

Saturday I went to a family dinner in Baltimore. Besides resolving an argument between two men at a bar over who was/is better "skill-wise," Kobi Bryant or Michael Jordan, my 78-year-old grandmother also provided this great anecdote:

"[discussion about how my grandmother is now a Harry Potter fan]...I remember at camp [in Waterford, ME] the summer when the first Harry Potter book came out. I had just returned from Bridgeton where I had picked up a copy for [her grandson] Jesse when I saw the UPS man. He had 21 identical boxes for the campers. I said 'Wow, Harry Potter is more popular than Stephen King.' The UPS man responded, 'Yep, and I've got his copy right here.'"

Sunday morning I volunteered at a workshop for Jewish 6th graders. About 300 congregated at the Berman Academy in Rockville, MD to learn about Jewish immigration. At the area I helped, the kids pretended that they had just arrived in America from Eastern Europe. In groups of four they wrote letters back to their families explaining: Why they came to America, What they have done since arriving, and What their future plans are. Once again, a stranger asked which kids were mine (and these were 11-yr-olds!).

Sunday afternoon, I visited the Sackler Gallery and focused on their Asian games exhibit. Turns out almost every game you can think of (backgammon, chess, cards, dominoes, go, parcheesi, polo, and (?) kickball) originated in Asia--with the possible exception of Chinese checkers. The scope of the collection was terrific--and the same could be said of the company ;)

This evening I had dinner at the house of my first boss, who has one of the most talkative two-year-olds I've met. Her shyness around me lasted about five seconds: next thing you know she was quizzing me on why I am a vegetarian :)

Cool new feature from our friends at Google (maybe this is what JonK was working on?):
weather 22202.

  Sat

42° | 31°

UPDATE: JonK's project did launch: Google's busniess center is now open for businnes.

The snow has already melted, but I had lots of fun with the white stuff when it was on the ground. Monday, during work hours, I was practically bouncing off the walls waiting to get outside. Unfortunately, coworkers and I had to go to a talk on Registration-based sampling that evening. I did complete my work duties in time to throw snowballs, make snow-iconography, and build small snow idols. (It was the perfect snow for starting with a small ball and rolling it on the ground until it was much larger.)

Tuesday evening I spent with Rain. We started with dinner on the mall and then moved on to ice skating in front of the national gallery. The ice desperately needed to be Zamboni'd, but no one arrived to smooth the ice. Post skating, we grabbed Mancala and played three competitive games at a Reston Starbucks. We split the games evenly: 1-1-1.

This morning, I had some oral surgery to stop gum recession. I blame my parents since they both had this same problem, passed their defective genes onto me, and then never told me to brush my teeth gently. So, I brushed hard, agitated my gums, the gums recessed, and now I needed fixing. Thankfully, there isn't any pain; I just have to avoid chewing on the left side of my mouth.

QOTD: "I don't know." In response to "Who is the Vice President [of the United States]?"

LOTD: Crack for the weak (courtesy of Chicklet)

"Tuff. T-U-F-F. Tuff."

At 3:40 a.m. Sunday, National Weather Service meteorologist Andy Woodcock looked at the swirling combination of data and wrote: "This is definitely a tuffy."

Oh, that reminds me:

CLIFF: I’ve been traded.
DONNA: To where?
CLIFF: House Government Oversight.
DONNA: What'd they trade you for?
CLIFF: Some toner, I think.
DONNA: [smiling] No, I mean why?
CLIFF: I don't know. We got a call from the Majority Leader's office. They wanted another litigator at Government Oversight and they didn't... they didn't say why...
DONNA: Maybe it was just an oversight.