chouyu_31

Breakfast was a somewhat eclectic mix of foods. I had some cucumber, rolls, swiss cheese, "pastrami", pan fried potatoes, and pancakes. All were quite tasty. The pancakes were what would be called Crepes in an IHOP. I used quotes around "pastrami" because the meat tasted like a light pastrami, but looked like a sliced ham.

We were provided with a fairly traditional lunch, consisting of a salad, pan fried potatoes, rice with vegitables, a pan fried fish, and a dessert with a berry sauce, whipped cream, and an oat of some kind. The salad was good, but wasn't quite suited to my mood. Everything tasted just about as one would expect them, which is tasty.

For dinner, I had a local fish, that I very much enjoyed, and a something that I have no idea what it was. There were also what seemed to be slices of preserved peaches on top and mixed in with the "something". More specifically, it was like they took rice or potatoes shredded to be the size of rice, then mixed it with a light cheese and cream. I hadn't really tasted anything like it, so I don't know how to describe it. Hedging my bets, I had ordered a dessert, which was a pastry with cheesecake-like filling (much lighter) with some berries inside, a vanilla sauce, and two kinds of berries. I thought one of the kinds of berries were lingenberries, but I seemed to have been wrong. The waitress called them "red berries", so no help there. They tasted like lingenberries, but who knows for sure? The other was physically the size of a cherry, but yellow in color and had no stem. It was good, maybe a bit like a sour cherry?

Tonight, for a belated Valentine's day dinner, Annie and I went to Agora Churrascaria. I had the intent to try as many different kinds of meat as I possibly could; including chicken hearts (never had them before). Everything else was fairly normal fare, a bit of lamb, chicken, pork tenderloin, all sorts of beef, and even some beef wrapped in bacon.

I'm fairly certain we had everything except for the parmesean encrusted pork tenderloin (we had the one without), but the guy basically speed walked right past us while our disks were set for "no more please", and we never saw him or his skewers again. Ah well, something to shoot for next time.

While I'm not meat drunk like Annie was when she first went, I am quite stuffed even after having been home for an hour. It is a little pricey for dinner, maybe we'll catch it for lunch some time, or stick to the salad bar, or something.

Three good things to report tonight.

1. I finally got that whole "driving a car registered in MN while being in CA" thing taken care of. It didn't take too long and only cost $25. Sweet.

2. I saw Nightwish tonight at The House of Blues in Anaheim. They rocked pretty good. Two thumbs up. I will say that 3 1/2 hours is a bit long to stand. The place could really use bench seating along the back wall. I'm also still hitting myself for not bringing Annie's digital camera for pictures. As Kevin said when I told him I should have, "Yeah, no kidding. This is the perfect thing to blog." Pefect indeed.

3. Guido van Rossum has said no to the suite-before-def decorator proposal (J2 on the decorator wiki). He seems to be deciding on syntax A1, which is reasonable, though I tend to prefer E1 and C1 more. One reason why I prefer E1 to all others is that one can do the following...

class foo:
    @__metaclass__(goo)
    @__doc__("documentation")

    def inst_method(self, args):
        ...

    def clas_method(cls, args):
        @classmethod
        ...
    
    def stat_method(args):
        @staticmethod
        ...

...which looks almost exactly like what we already have for metaclasses, documentation, etc.

But ah well, you can't always have everything you want, now can you?


P.S. Even mild Thai curry is too damn hot for this cracker. At least tonight I have milk, last night the Sprite just wasn't cutting it.

It is 2AM in Minnesota on Saturday night/Sunday morning.

Yesterday we got to see outfitorangefan and her husband Jon, much fun and good food at the Peking (something) on the corner of University and Huron in Minneapolis. Mmm, I love fun noodles.

Much fun was had with blasphemina (her boyo Ryan) and endoris early today (I have the pictures on my computer, but I am too lazy to upload them) BSing about damn near everything game and comic related. Pity Ryan doesn't like Transmetropolitan, but he's still cool.

A different kind of fun was had at the get together that discoflamingo and gnfnrf hosted, namely 8-player deathmatch Halo. I don't know what anyone expected we were going to do (I had no idea), but it worked out pretty well I think. I wish we would have taken pictures, *slap self*.

We are very sorry that we didn't make it to gunn's waffle breakfast (we woke up at 10:30 this morning, and didn't leave the house until like 1:45). We hear that we missed sylunethesigher (we are very sorry). We'll catch you next time, we promise.


Well, it took 10 minutes, but I fixed my parents' computer. So check this shit out. We come in on Wednesday night, and I discover that the fan inside the power supply had died (has been dead for months, running non-stop, probably 150 degrees F easy). So we turn off the computer, let it sit overnight, and the next day we buy a fan, customize it (the computer is Annie's old eMachines with a custom power supply, pictures later), and make it work. So it works all Thursday, then Friday around noon, the power supply dies (it looked to be the fuse, but we didn't want to risk it). We buy the smallest power supply we can, and I modify the internals of the case sufficiently to make it fit (I'll post pictures of the external results later), and everything is fine. I decide to install Nuts & Bolts 98 for the awesome defragmenter Saturday morning, and it will no longer boot. I defrag in safe-mode (Saturday afternoon while hanging with blasphemina and others), unstall the software in safe-mode (after get together at discoflamingo's place), and everything just works. I love 10 minute fixes. Now I just need to deal with the 4-5 hours of sleep I'm going to get tonight, uck.

Speaking of which, goodnight everyone, it was fun. You make us want to move back to this land of god-forsaken winters. Where's my damn teleporter?

Hey everyone, just a short update tonight.

You know how I warned about not being around much or commenting much just before the Phase II? Yeah, well, that same warning applies now.

For the coming two weeks, I'm going to be in a serious time crunch. I have some homework due on Tuesday (that deserves a few more hours work on), and I have a term project that is due either Wednesday of this week, or sometime next week. I've also got a 24-hour take-home final to do Tuesday-Wednesday of next week, and am giving and grading a final Wednesday of next week.

So yeah, you can say busy.

Oh, then there's the research and algorithm design that I need to work on...



Yesterday (Saturday, June 5), Annie and I drove up to Van Nuys to meet with a friend of mine that I haven't seen in 5 1/2 years. Lissette Giron, who (when I met her) was a foreign exchange student, who spent fall semester of my senior year studying at my high school. Her and her family came to visit the following year (which is why it is 5 1/2 instead of 6 1/2).

She just graduated college, and is visiting some relatives in the LA area with her family.

We got a chance to head down to Hollywood, check out the stars on the sidewalk (very cool), and actually saw a celebrity (not "star" because she's anything but); Paris Hilton. A few words to describe Paris: attention whore, bad hair, looks as slutty in real life as she does on TV. Honestly, seeing James Marsters in a bar was more exciting, and I'm sure many of you remember the words I had to say about that.

We had fun, ate some amazing food at Koji's (Shabu Shabu is fucking amazing, I'm hooked), and attempted to just enjoy hanging out until we dropped her off and made our way back to Irvine.


Anyways, I should be going to bed. I need to get up in 7 hours. Boy, I can't wait until I'm done with finals and such, this summer is going to be great; no 8AM mornings again, if I can help it (I think I can).

I would just have my parents call and say I was sick.

No, seriously. For some reason, the cereal I ate this morning for breakfast is not being kind. This morning it does not really matter (I'm only going to be attending the class I am a TA for), so I could probably skip, but this afternoon from 3:30-5 I have randomized algorithms.

Honestly, I'm learning lots, but then again, I feel like a retard compared to some other students in the class. I should probably just skip class this morning and spend the next 6 hours trying to do the randomized algorithms homework that I've spent ~3 hours on so far, and have made no progress (the homework states that it should take about 8 hours to do).

I better go to class. Blah.

Sour skittles will be the death of me. I can't taste sour stuff since I started eating them last night and used listerine after brushing my teeth. I think my tongue hates me.

When I went to pick up the rental car in Phoenix, there was a bit of a problem: seems that while the reservation agent said that I could rent a car at Phoenix with National car rental (with a $25 under 25 years old fee, total cost ~$135), the agent denied such a thing was true. 20 minutes later, I ended up driving out of there with a Monte Carlo from Alamo (Alamo and National are tied in some fashion) for $220. Son of a bitch. It would have been cheaper to fly round trip from Irvine to Phoenix, but I suppose then we wouldn't have had room for gifts.

Originally Annie's parents were planning on driving us home to Irvine, but they decided not to, and are going to pay for the rental car. I'll probably split the difference with them. It was actually a good thing that they weren't driving us home...we wouldn't have had the room. The Monte Carlo was packed.

Oh, note to anyone who wants to buy a car: the Chevy Impala and Chevy Malibu are the exact same fucking car, save some exterior styling. From what I could ascertain, they had identical performance and economy characteristics, as well as identical internal styling. Pick the cheaper one.


Pulling into Quartzite, AZ for lunch, we notice a guy who obviously hadn't shaven in at least two months with a sign reading "help, need food and gas".

I've never been in such a situation myself. I can imagine that it would suck pretty fucking bad - half way between Phoenix and LA. A quick stop by a cash machine gave us money to purchase food for us at McD's, and a swing by the dude on the corner resulted in the following interaction:
Annie: Hey dude, here you go.
dude jogs to our car
Guy: Thank you!
dramatic pause as he checks the bill
Guy: Dude! This is $10?!?
Annie: Yeah, we know.
Guy: Wow, thank you!

Seeing the look on the dude's face made the shitty rental car deal feeling wash away. I hope the dude (and his friends we later saw eating food in the shade) made it home.


Getting into the LA area wasn't so bad...until we took the 60 west. At around the Moreno Vally dot, traffic slowed to a crawl. I had to use the bathroom for the 20 previous miles, and the 10 mintues spent rolling along between two exits made me decide to pull off for a bathroom break and to look at a map to see if we could bypass the shit traffic.

Note to all: KFC bathrooms in CA are shitty.

After a little side-trip that got us nowhere, I check a map at a gas station. Phat, there's a semi-major divided highway just to the south of 60. We took Heacock south to this highway (once again making the joke that I had previously made on our way to Phoenix: Heacock, what about she-cock...and thinking later in my head: we all know he's got a cock, but if she's got a cock, the date is ruined - in reference to nothing in particular).


When we were around 5 miles from home, I stopped to get gas at the slowest gas pump I've ever been to. It took no less than 5 minutes to pump ~15 gallons of gas. I believe my kitchen faucet is faster. And the pump managed to drip on my hand as I was opening the gas cap. Bastard. The gas station bathroom had no soap, and was as poorly equipped as the KFC bathroom.


Once we got back to the apartment, we then had to carry up our stuff (we live on the 4th floor, no elevator). Each of us had a bag (Annie's weiged 45 pounds, I carried it), two laundry baskets with misc goodies, one large box with presents, two smaller boxes with overflow (we brought our laundry to Phoenix), a bookcase, cabinet, chair, and a half-dozen small bags with Annie's misc stuff. By the time I was done, the sprinkling rain and 50 degrees was too warm to wear a hoodie.


Shopping for food went off without a hitch (we got food), and it only took two more washings and some dry skin to get rid of the gasoline.




In terms of Christmas: it was cool. New Years was cool too. I got some shirts that I'm stoked about, and some chocolate that I'm looking forward to eating.

As the subject line says, Annie and I are home. Super-ultra-mega props go out to tillerman, who dropped us off and picked us up from the airport on the California end.

We had a good time seeing everyone, eating food, especially the PIE. MMM, Pumpkin pie. Picked up some Christmas presents, relaxed a bunch, and am looking forward to this last week of classes, and a week of finals.


Two unrelated notes...

I had borrowed a book from David Eppstein that had some information about a structure I've been working on for the last couple months. Unfortunately, it didn't offer more information than I already had, but this morning I woke up at 6:30AM Phoenix time with a bit of insight on the problem that may end up doing a lot of good.


Annie received an email from a random fellow who happens to read I'm Blue and asked about my dynamic mud. After a few emails back and forth, his belief was that in order to make it dynamic in any way, one needed a database (like *SQL, DB, Oracle or Access). I expressed to him (in a none-to-polite manner) that databases were merely a data store. Certainly they can offer things like transactions, fallover, redundancy, etc., that would make some things easy to do (multiple automatically mirrored databases for multiple servers in gigantic muds), but it doesn't allow any additional amount of dynamicism. It also happens to ease some on-disk representation issues, which is completely worthless for Python systems with the wonder that is the Shelve module and little pieces of code like this:

class example:
    def __init__(self, dct={}):
        def_dict = {
        #insert default definitions here
        }
        self.__dict__.update(def_dict)
        self.__dict__.update(dct)
    def __repr__(self):
        return "example(%s)"%repr(self.__dict__)

With proper support code ( eval(repr(obj)) ), one can even translate objects from one version of the object to another.

Anyways. I ended up pissing the guy off. He says:

    I find your email very disrespectful.  I apologize for bothering you, as 
I so clearly have, and will not write you again. Please do not send me any 
more email.

I apologized in an email, but who knows if he even gives a fuck. *shrug*



Anyways, I hope everyone's Turkey-day went well. I better go catch up on your livejournals.

In my effort to complete a presentation that I give on Tuesday while Annie is at her FIRST DAY OF WORK AT GAMESTOP, I completely forgot the time, and am now hungry. Hrm...what should I have for lunch. *looks through cupboards* *looks at table* *grabs some leftover candy* *eats some* *realizes that one must eat a real lunch*

Why must candy be so damn convenient? A guy should have to jump through some hoops in order to eat it, otherwise, real food has no chance.