Monday, April 28, 2003

Free cone day at Ben & Jerry's tomorrow!

Saturday, April 26, 2003

I saw Better Luck Tomorrow, which just opened in Michigan. Good movie! Many people have commented on their blogs about whatever significance this movie holds for Asian Americans. Other than the fact that this movie contains a lot of them, it doesn't really deal with race. See it because it's good, not because it has Asians in it. It does have a pretty sweet-looking classic BMW motorcycle though.

Got a pair of new Pirelli P6 tires, which are just your average all-season H-rateds. Since I just bought the other pair a few weeks ago, they gave me a discount, which was kinda cool. Anyway, in terms of performance and road noise, these tires are somewhere between the Dunlop D60A2s that I had before and the Bridgestone Potenzas that were original equipment. I can't really test the performance aspect too well since there are no Sunset Blvds and Mulholland Drives out here. Snow traction should be a little better too, but hopefully I won't have to test that out for another 8 months.

I'm reading a book called The Cuckoo's Egg, by Cliff Stoll, which is a non-fiction account of how they caught a computer hacker from West Germany in the 80's. It's pretty good if you're interested in such things, although I guess it's not just for computer geeks since it was on the New York Times bestseller list for four months.

Funny: http://www.livejournal.com/users/kim_jong_il__

Friday, April 25, 2003

I saw Identity today. I can't decide if I liked it or not. It did a good job of building up suspense and all that, but I'm not sure the payoff was worth it. Pretty interesting though. Aha! I just looked up one of the actresses and figured out why she looked familiar. It's Fran from Mad About You. Donnie Darko's dad is also in it.

I saw a trailer for S.W.A.T. (Samuel L. Jackson, Colin Farrell, Michelle Rodriguez). That could be good, in a summer action movie kind of way.

Today my dinner consisted of ramen, sour patch watermelon candy, a hot pocket, popcorn, and ice cream. Healthy eatin'!

I took off my front license plate today because I was seeing if it would leave holes or something in the front bumper. (Planning to get a Michigan plate some time next week, and we don't have front plates here.) Anyway there weren't holes, but there was a license-plate-shaped rectangle of 6 year old dirt, underneath which was a license-plate-shaped rectangle of unfaded paint not quite matching the rest of the bumper's paint. Oh well. I have to look at it in the sunlight to see if it's that noticeable.

My remaining pair of old tires is down to the wear bars so I gotta get another pair of tires. Man, those Dunlops only lasted 26K miles.

I think the TiVo project is going to wait until my roommate gets back from vacation next week because he might have a coax crimper that I could use. Well, I suppose I could try installing my TV card in the meantime.

Man, the Dodgers scored 5 runs today, and I get zero RBIs and only one run from my predominantly-Dodger fantasy team because the guys who did the scoring were all on my bench. Doh.

Tuesday, April 22, 2003

Not much goin on. I was noticing that the busier I am, the more I seem to want to blog. On one hand this makes sense since the more I'm doing the more there is to write about. On the other hand it's kind of annoying since I don't have time to blog when I'm busy, and when I'm free I have nothing to write about.

Not having to wake up early for classes is nice.

The other day I was thinking, it'd be nice to have a TiVo, since I don't have time to watch TV but I would like to catch the occasional show, but VCR's are too annoying to use (having to manage blank tapes and make sure other people don't want to use the VCR at the same time, etc.). But I don't want to buy one because it's expensive and there's a monthly fee too. So, my next project: make use of the TV card I have laying around somewhere, hook up that unused cable that's in my room to the drop outside, and get my computer to act as TiVo with MythTV. Linux and free software are cool.

Friday, April 18, 2003

I just saw this on Phil's site. How amazingly cool is this: http://home.attbi.com/~bernhard36/honda-ad.html ... I sat and watched that thing like 4 times. It reminded me of 6th grade, when we did Rube Goldberg puzzles.

Read the articles that the page links to too. It's real, and it "only" took 606 takes to get right. Wow. Bonus points if you can recognize all of the car parts in there. =)

By the way that's the UK Accord, which is our Acura TSX. It's supposed to be a 3-series contender, so definitely it could be an interesting car. It's front wheel drive, though. And I'm not sure when it comes out.. has it already? I haven't seen any around here yet.

Thursday, April 17, 2003

A couple of days ago I got a haircut: (it's not gelled or anything since I just took a shower before this picture)

I also got a free Volkswagen hat from something on campus:

The hat is actually black (as are the sweatpants on my bed in the background) but my webcam just gives a blue tint to everything that is black (except, apparently, my chair).

**

I note that it's Mike's birthday. Happy Birthday, Mike! Life doesn't suck all that much.

Wednesday, April 16, 2003

Today was the last day of classes. To celebrate, one of our profs took us to Ashley's (local bar), where I became slightly tipsy. Heh heh. I didn't do anything that interesting, though. Alcohol makes me do three things: turn red; have to go to the bathroom a lot; and become sleepy. I may have talked more, also.

Because of the sleepy factor, I think I'll sleep early tonight.

Tuesday, April 15, 2003

Minor things: added "next" and "previous" links to the photo albums. Also added a couple pictures of my cats in the "Other" section.

Monday, April 14, 2003

Happy Birthday, Jenny!

Wednesday, April 9, 2003

So, what think you about the new font and stuff?

Congrats on your car, Allan. But where are the pictures? Heh.

Brian's page looks purty.

I'm tired. Must sleep now.

Monday, April 7, 2003

It snowed around 4 inches today. Here's me preparing a snowball:

Walking home after class was kind of cool. There was "freezing drizzle" which coated the top of the snow with a thin layer of ice, so walking around made a crack-crack noise.

My mom sent me a couple of pictures that she took when I was on my "incognito" trip to LA. Since they're of my motorcycle, I put them on my Hawk GT page. (As you can probably tell, the last two are old pictures that I scanned in. Allan probably will remember taking them a couple of years ago. The lighting is kind of weird so they didn't come out that great.)

In other news, we submitted the final draft of the ASAP paper, so I linked it on my research page. The PLDI paper is almost done too. That one's due Friday.

I installed Red Hat 9. So far so good.. things look "purtier".. but my printer/scanner stopped working at first and I had to reinstall all the drivers for that.

Friday, April 4, 2003

Since y'all asked, the ASAP home page is here. If you click on "Conference Program" and search for my name you'll see it. The final draft isn't done yet (it's due on Sunday) but I'll post it on my Research page when it is.

**

Small blurb on baseball. I used to be a big Dodger fan in the early 90's. Back then the heart of our lineup was Kirk Gibson, Eddie Murray, and Kal Daniels; our veteran catcher/plate blocker was Mike Scioscia; our pitching staff included Orel Hershiser, Fernando Valenzuela, and the rookie Ramon Martinez.. the following years saw the arrival of Darryl Strawberry and Eric Davis, and consecutive rookies of the year Karros, Piazza, Mondesi, Nomo, and Hollandsworth (though I stopped following baseball around '94, before Nomomania). I remember being at Dodger Stadium when Kal Daniels hit one of his grand slams. This was also the era of Ozzie Smith, Kevin Mitchell, Bobby Bonilla, Tony Gwynn, Jose Canseco, Doc Gooden, Nolan Ryan, Bo Jackson (Bo knows...), and one-handed Jim Abbott (who played for the California, not Anaheim, Angels). 1990 was the only year in history a team (Cincinnati) went wire to wire. The Dodger announcers were Vin Scully and the late Don Drysdale. I used to listen to them almost every game, falling asleep to 790 KABC.

Old times.

Now in fantasy baseball whenever I see a guy whose name I recognize from that time, it makes me think back to playing 2-man baseball in my friend's backyard, with imaginary baserunners. We had rules governing how the imaginary runners ran.. for example if there was an imaginary guy on 1st and you tagged 2nd before the batter reached 1st, that meant you got a force. Lots of inside-the-park homers. Good times.

I probably haven't caught a ball with a baseball glove for 9 years.

Thursday, April 3, 2003

I don't remember if I mentioned this before, but our paper got accepted to ASAP, so I'm going to the Netherlands in June. (Nether regions?)

I just got a new printer/scanner. It's pretty cool. I was surprised how easy it was to set up in Linux. I actually think the Linux scanning frontend (Xsane) is more user-friendly than the Windows one. Anyway, it's an HP PSC-750 which was just discontinued so I got it pretty cheap on ebay ($90). Not a bad deal considering it's a decent printer and a flatbed scanner and a copier. Perhaps I will post some photos from my road trip back in August when I get around to it.