Tuesday, June 10, 2008

It's been a while... sadly, I broke my streak of blogging at least once every month since 2002.

I spent most of the first half of May working on a paper (last one as a grad student!). Finally got that submitted. After that, Jenny came to visit. Among the things that we did was to fly up to Mackinac Island for a day trip, along with Mark and Mojtaba. I uploaded some photos here. It was fun, it was the longest trip I've flown so far (logged 4.9 hours). The island was cool, although I'm glad we just did a day trip because I'm not sure there's enough to see for a multiple-day trip.

The other major thing I've been doing recently is going on job interviews. So in the past few weeks I've flown to the west coast four times: twice to Seattle and twice to the Bay Area. I had the opportunity to meet up with a lot of west coast friends, so that's been cool. Also I've logged several thousand frequent flyer miles, so that's a side benefit. On one flight, I traded seats with someone because there was a couple who wanted to sit together; the flight attendant actually gave me a voucher (for a free meal or some frequent flyer miles) as thanks. The seat-switching was already beneficial to me because I went from a middle seat to a window seat.

How 'bout gas prices. I filled up a couple of weeks ago, and it cost me $71. Yikes.

So there might be another chunk of days without blogging, because next week I'm going to China and Korea for a couple of weeks. There's a conference in Beijing that I'm going to, and also I'm visiting Samsung in Seoul for a couple of days. It's going to be my first time in China... should be interesting. I wonder how much I'll be able to get around with my limited Chinese.

Oh yeah! I got rear-ended in a McDonald's drive-thru. Haha. There's some damage to my rear bumper but it's not bad. I'm debating whether I should bother to get it fixed. On the one hand, I should, because it'll be free (since it's the other guy's fault). On the other hand, I'll have to go through the trouble of getting estimates, getting in contact with the guy who hit me and/or insurance companies, and not having the car for a few days... plus the car is getting old and I don't really care about some bumper scratches all that much.