Happy Birthday Jake!
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A truly enjoyable moment, for me, is when I wake up but I know that I don’t have to get up. I lie in bed, not exactly awake but not in deep sleep either. That’s the time when I have most of my lucid dreams. If I worked from home, I could have those moments everyday. I wonder, tho, whether they would lose their meaning if I had them all the time? I remember sitting at a speech Kernighan gave at Carnegie Mellon my junior year. He was funny and interesting which is a lot to say about a computer science person. Especially one as bright as he. A student at CMU recently interviewed him for a Romanian magazine and translated the interview to English and posted the link to slashdot. If you’re into programming, I think you’d find the interview informative. Even if you don’t care about programming, I think it’s fascinating to hear what he has to say. When asked about teaching programming classes he comments on how schools should not be teaching things people can learn in trade schools and goes on to say, “That’s not what universities should be doing; universities should be teaching things which are likely to last, for a lifetime if you’re lucky, but at least 5 or 10 or 20 years, and that means principles and ideas. At the same time, they should be illustrating them with the best possible examples taken from current practice.” Another interesting point is when the interviewer asks him what areas a student who’s interested in computers should enter, amongst other things, he says, “I think unfortunately the best advice you can give somebody is “do what you think is interesting, do something that you think is fun and worthwhile, because otherwise you won’t do it well anyway”. But that’s not any real help.” As I said, it’s an interesting interview. I just saw a Rick Lazio ad about how Hilary Clinton is running ads bashing him. The ad talks about how she has nothing better to do, etc. Isn’t he doing the same thing by running this ad? I really don’t understand why candidates run ads that put down their opponents. Do they really think that people vote for them because they said something negative about the other person? The same behavior bothers me in corporate ads. When Pepsi runs an ad bashing Coke or vice versa, I feel like they must be so pathetic that they need to put down the competition. Their own product obviously must have no redeeming qualities. Home at last. Another seven-hour trip and we’re back in the beautiful city of New York. My little bird jumped up and down when he saw us and my flowers seem to have survived the weekend. So far so good. Have you read any children’s books lately? I checked Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs from the New York Public Library after reading a delightful amazon review of it. I highly recommend it. It’s neat to read creative and entertaining children’s books. At the back of the book, in the blurb about Ron Barrett, the illustrator, is the following note: “Mr. Barrett says his drawings of meatballs in no way endorses their consumption. He’s a vegetarian.” Wanna read all the candidate’s speeches? As a non-American, I don’t qualify to vote, but I still think it’s kinda cool that all the candidates have their own homepages. The fact that they can’t afford not to have an online presence says so much about the importance of the Net. I’ve spent a major part of today going through brig’s portal and I must say there are a large number of weblogs out there. Obviously, expressing one’s thoughts is not a new hobby by any means, but it’s interesting to me that many of the sites have the same links. I wonder if that means that the people behind the pages are interested in similar subject matter. Or does it mean that the people are doing what they think will get the hits to their page? Just wondering. I also noticed that the list of ‘my favorite blogs’ varies only slightly amongst pages. What do these people have that the others don’t? I wonder if weblogging has gotten to be like high school where you’re either ‘in’ or you’re not. How do you get in? Maybe it’s all just random and most likely, it doesn’t even matter. I guess I am just curious cause I just started this journey and I like to analyze things to death. Like tests? Check out emode. I’ve already wasted a good portion of my morning on it. After you do the true-color test, checkout the weblog colorwheel, it’s a neat idea! I’ve been in love with the Herman Miller Aeron chair for quite a long time, but it’s way too expensive. Today, I found a place that claims to have it for much cheaper. Their price is just 50 bucks less than the Herman Miller store. And for a chair which costs 750 dollars, 50 bucks less is not “much cheaper.” If anyone knows where this chair is sold for a more affordable price, I would worship you forever if you share the info. A while ago, a friend visiting Turkey told me that five of the seven wonders of the ancient world are in Turkey. Which, of course, isn’t true. Tonight, over dinner, we tried to remember all the wonders but were able to only come up with five. So I found the site and we got them all. Greece has two, as does Egypt and Iraq has one. The other two are in Turkey. One in Bodrum and the other in Efes, close to Izmir. This is for those of you who always wanted to drive the wienermobile. Man, Japanese is hard. I have to learn around 100 kanji for the exam in December on top of all the grammar and vocabulary. In fact, the language is so hard that many native speakers cannot read the newspaper. The kids in Japan go to school six days a week. What’s the point of making your language so hard that even the native speakers cannot fully learn it? It just makes so little sense to me. But I do find it fascinating and really fun to learn. I like the way they put meaningful symbols together to form words. For example the two symbols which make up the word telephone (denwa) are the symbol for electricity and the symbol for speaking. The symbols for electricity and car make up the word for train (densha). Neat isn’t it? We got up at 6:30am and took a cab at 7am to the Hertz rental place in midtown and drove for the next three hours to New London, Connecticut. Then, we grabbed a taxi from the Hertz drop off place to get to the docks. We waited there for about two hours and took a 2 and a half-hour boat. The boat arrived at 2:30pm. A total of 8 hours of traveling just to get from NYC to Martha’s Vineyard. Is it worth it? During the entire trip, the answer was a decided no, but now that we’re here and I can hear the crickets and the seagulls, I’m having second thoughts. It might be a pain in the ass to get here, but it’s like a little piece of heaven on earth, which must be the reason we’re willing to repeat this ordeal several times a summer. Oh, btw, another movie following on the theme of “I am woman, hear me roar” is: Woman on Top. 2000 must be the year when women finally become independent. At least as far as Hollywood is concerned… |
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