Thursday, December 25, 2003

Merry Christmas!

Break has been pretty good. Saw Lord of the Rings and Last Samurai. Read Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut which I borrowed from Mike, as well as Prey by Michael Crichton, both pretty good judging from how fast I read them. I read the former in one day, but that was because I had 5 hours of flight time plus 4 hours of waiting time to kill.

It's raining right now.. I read in the paper that it's the first time in 20 years that it's rained in LA on Christmas Day. Well, it's good news for snowboarding this weekend.

Leah and Allan contributed to the Faces of... gallery. Yay Photoshop!

Thursday, December 18, 2003

Ah, California. The weather today was great .. in the 70s, with a clear blue sky. I got my motorcycle up and running this morning (just had to hose it down and get rid of the insects that had taken up residence over the past six months). A couple of cranks and it started.. the battery tender I bought last year was definitely a good investment.

Anyway I rode up PCH along the ocean, from Santa Monica up through Malibu.. the ocean was so blue and picturesque, and the weather just right. I can't believe this is winter. Makes me wonder, what am I doing in Michigan?? Ha. Anyway then I went up to the Valley through some canyons, Topanga Canyon to be specific, and got in some lane-splitting practice on the 101. Carved back down through the Santa Monica Mountains via the Sepulveda Pass and split my way down Sepulveda back home. Great ride.. it's been way too long.

A great feeling is when you crest the mountains on a motorcycle.. you can tell right when you cross the line because the temperature all of a sudden gets 10 degrees cooler from the Valley to the Westside. It's something you miss out on completely in a car.

Tuesday, December 16, 2003

Woo hoo, I'm completely done with classes this semester! Long update coming. Enjoy it, because I don't know when the next one will be. =)

For some reason I've been looking into RSS. It'll let you aggregate sites that have RSS feeds together onto one page, something like Xanga's "sites I read" thing, only it's not Xanga-specific. I made a basic prototype here using Eugene, Kristin and Ian's sites as guinea pigs. It's slow right now because every time you reload the page it reloads every feed. Plus it's not very intelligent about what to show.. right now it just shows the entire feed. I figure it'd be better if it just showed the first 5 lines or something.

Anyway, I think this is pretty cool so give me suggestions on how to improve it. I could have it remember individual users' feeds, for example, and then you could look on this one page to see what's new on all the news/blog sites you usually check. Btw if you're running a non-Xanga site you should publish a feed so I can include yours. =)

My own feed isn't quite perfect -- entries containing relative URLs such as on-site pics and links won't work if an aggregator other than myself includes my feed. But I haven't gotten around to "absolutizing" all my relative links yet (or else making my feed generator smart enough to do it for me). Btw I am using RSSWriter which is some PHP code that does the XML formatting of the feed.

In other news, I finished reading Solitaire Mystery by Jostein Gaarder, which was recommended to me by my summer roommate Peter. Pretty good. It's a quick read, kinda fairy-tale-like, and raises interesting philosophical questions. This is the author of Sophie's World, if you've heard of that.

Here are some funny search strings that people have used to get to my page:

• kevin the computer guy
• haw flakes
• how much do whales ejaculate
• pictures of bored people
• what makes asians turn red
• difference between green onions and scallions
• picture of my new haircut gelled up in the front
• pictures of dan rather interviewing saddam

And I also find it amusing that something like 75% of queries have to do with Nissan Maxima.

A year ago I mentioned that I really like that show Scrubs. Well, I still do. I've been watching a lot of episodes lately. Most recently when I should have been working on my take-home final.

I personally think this is awesome. You know Legos have advanced from when you were a kid, when you can program their movements and do image recognition. I just built houses and cars.

Along similar lines, this is pretty cool too.

1 day to go. I get a 3-hour layover in Chicago tomorrow. Have a good vacation everyone!

Friday, December 12, 2003

I used my ice scraper last night for the first time this season. It is getting cold out here, man! 17 degrees at the moment. I can't decide if it's really colder this year or if I just got soft.

I just finished my last project/paper for the semester.. Now I'm all done except for a take-home exam next week. This week has been pretty hectic so I'm going to sleep all weekend. Ahhh. That will be nice.

5 days left...

Tuesday, December 9, 2003

You know what I am still not used to? Meeting people (generally, grad students) who are close to my age and finding out later that they're married. Isn't that kinda weird? I guess generally these people are a couple of years older than me, but they still look and act like students (as opposed to "grown-ups") so it's still a bit of a surprise. I guess the fact that none of the people in my research group are married adds to my not being used to it.

8 days until LA.

Sunday, December 7, 2003

I'm back in Michigan now. Let's see, what have I been doing...

Had a Thanksgiving feast in the Big Apple with Jenny. Saw the lights at the Bronx Zoo, walked the Brooklyn Bridge, saw 21 Grams which was pretty good, and saw Avenue Q on Broadway which was hilarious. Lots o' fun.

Then it was off to San Diego for MICRO. The first day we saw Governator Arnold give a speech in the plaza by the hotel. The last day we went down to Tijuana and walked around on Revolucion Avenue where we saw a lot of striped donkeys and strip bars. In between were lots of pretty interesting paper presentations, a dinner cruise, and pretty good Mexican food. Not bad.

But now is the busiest time of the year.. I may not be posting a whole lot between now and the end of the semester. There are only:

10 days until LA...