Category Archives: Life

You Light Up My Idea Bulb

As I often do on Sunday night, I went to the Sonoma Chicken Coop in Campbell (which is many miles from actual Sonoma) and did a quick set before heading over to Katie Bloom’s down the street for some Sunday night karaoke with my friend Sean.

The stench of garlic fries hit me hard as soon as we went through the doors. There was a huge crowd at the table in the middle, and Sean immediately recognized them as the cast of the play “The King and I”; the same gang that was there a few weeks back.

Cast members did a lot of songs, and they did them with a confidence and professionalism that was almost unfair to us amateurs. One song they did was “You Light Up My Life”, where the entire cast sang to an older blonde woman who sat on a chair nearby, directing them.

Afterwards, I asked a guy, “Is she the musical director?” He explained to me that she was Debby Boone, who originally recorded the song they sung to her. It suddenly made a lot more sense.

I lived in Los Angeles for three years and never once saw a famous person outside of places you might expect them (like at venues that they were scheduled to appear at). Yet here I was, in downtown Campbell on a Sunday night, singing karaoke in a bar with a real live honest-to-goodness recording artist. Pretty neat.

There were a bunch of other folks around, including some regulars that I recognized. Sean had left at this point, so I was by myself. There was one other dude by himself, and Kathy (who cleverly calls herself “Kathy-oke”) called his name and, reading from the karaoke slip, said “Pete will be singing with Debby Boone.” Debby looked up, alternating between confused and scared, but made her way up. And they sang! I forget what the song was, but it was a pretty classic duet.

At this point, I realized the guy was a genius, and marveled at his chuztpah (which I think is Yiddish for “balls”). I had my camera, so I took a bunch of photos, and afterward, got his email address because I figured he would want a copy.

I know it was genius because I was jealous: I wish I had thought of it!

By the way, I talked to Debby for a few minutes and found her to be very pleasant. I don’t know why I feel the need to point this out, but there it is. See the Flickr Photos

Great Minds Think Alike

A news story about conjoined (aka “Siamese”) twins joined at the head just born in Canada. I read the story and it turns out the parents are from the small town I grew up in! Wow!! I don’t think I know anyone in their families, but still nevertheless, as far as stories about conjoined twins being born close to home go, it’s pretty cool.

I used to think nothing ever happened in Vernon. But ten years ago, one of the biggest mass murders in Canadian history took place there. Now this! That place is turning into a freak show. Maybe if they get a bearded lady, I shall move back.

(Good heavens — is this turning into a gossip column?)

Eye Hurt Myself

Yesterday I had laser eye surgery of the PRK variety.

PRK is different from the more popular LASIK… in LASIK, they cut a flap and fold it back before zapping your cornea. In PRK, they scrape off the outermost layer, then zap away. It’s a little safer and can be applied in cases when you have thin corneas (as I do), but the downside is that your vision is blurrier post-surgery and it hurts more.

It hurts more. I had the surgery at 9:15 AM, and by 4 or 5, my eye was hurting quite a lot. I dug out the vicodin I had leftover from my shoulder surgery last year, forgetting that it doesn’t really do that much for me. So then I found the percocet I got after the vicodin didn’t work, and took some of that. Sure enough, THAT did the trick. Plus I felt dizzy and smooth. And time really seemed to fly.

My left eye is a little clearer this morning. When I woke, it didn’t hurt at all, but then I got to a room with a little light and… well, it started to water and hurt. Big time. A percocet seems to have done the trick, so I have about six hours of smooth dizziness, itching and freedom from pain ahead of me.

Help alleviate my boredom! Call or write!

i cANT believe this is happening

Ants have invaded.

Not my kitchen. Not my bathroom. Not my closet.

My car.

That’s right. For some reason, despite the lack of anything in the vicinity that could be considered edible or even organic, a gang (or is it “army”?) of ants has decided that my automobile would be a perfectly reasonable and sensible place to locate their home base.

It all started a few days back when I noticed an ant in my car. I had it crawl onto my hand, then I rolled down the window and put him outside. Didn’t think much of it.

Then the next day, I got in my car in the morning to go to work, and I noticed several ants on the dash. I thought that was odd. Then I noticed a few more by the gear shift. Then I noticed several coming out of my vents — like a scene from a nightmare horror movie.

I opened the door and saw several in my door jam. They seemed to be coming out from under this plastic cover protector, so I tapped on it a bit (a trick I learned from an enthusiastic exterminator a few years ago) and a few more came out.

I decided a car wash would be in order. I went to a self-serve wash with a pressure spray, and went through the whole cycle, being particularly sure to hit those cracks in the car where ants might be hiding. Then I spent a little time wiping ants out of the door jam. And I drove to work.

It’s a bit tricky driving an ant-infested car… I’d frequently see an ant on the dash within reach, and have to grab for my tissue to crush it. If you don’t hit it just right, it just crawl onto the tissue and then you’re carrying an ant-covered tissue in one hand while you drive. A tad distracting. I’d put the tissue out the window while I was holding it so the wind would blow away any uncrushed crawlers into history.

I got to worked and had a pretty typical day. After work, I went out to the car, opened the door and checked out the jam. There were a ton of ants in there, moving at double time. They were frantic, they were numerous, and they were on the move. I think either the car wash or the driving made them decide to pull up stakes and relocate yet again, because most of them were carrying eggs in their ant mouths. So I spent some time crushing and sweeping them out of the door jam to assist in reducing their numbers.

I drove to Ron’s Farmhouse for the Friday night show. Whenever I got to a red light, I would open the door a bit and sweep out any ants that had emerged. One particularly long red light, I was sweeping and crushing frantically, when I looked up at the car next to me and saw the Chinese driver staring with obviously confused wonder as to what could possibly be transpiring in the car next to him. He did not look very Americanized, so I suspect he may have considered that he was witnessing a methamphetamine addict in an episode (“How very American!”). His female passenger (in the back seat oddly enough) had a similar look of confusion.

I, realizing their reasonable confusion and being a conscientious citizen (well, Permanent Resident at least), thought it my duty to alleviate their confusion. So I made what I considered the internationally recognized motion for “roll down your window”. They did not (nor did they even acknowledge this rudimentary attempt to communnicate). Nevertheless, I shouted out through their closed windows “ANTS!” You know, as though that would clear things up. (“Ah, he has ants in his car. Remember when that happened to Sheng?”)

They still showed no sign of commiseration. I couldn’t think of any other way to get my point across. Had I had a English-to-Mandarin dictionary and/or the ability to write Chinese script characters, I would have hand crafted a sign with the equivalent of the single English word “ANTS” and held it up. But the light turned green and I had to close my door and be on my way.

Of course, that thing happened where you do something bizarre and embarrassing to a stranger in an adjacent vehicle, and for the next several blocks and stop lights, they are still there next to you, trying to tread the careful balance of treating you with continued equanimity and being cautious for your next bout of unpredictable insanity.

The ants are still in the car, although their numbers are fewer and (hopefully) dwindling. I am learning to co-exist with them.

I Went To Hack Day and It Was Pretty Good

I just got back from “Yahoo! Hack Day”, an ultra-nerdy convention of sorts put on at Yahoo! in Sunnyvale. It was sort of reminiscent of the now-defunct MacHack conventions I went to in the early naughties (2000 and 2001 I think) except it was free, more conveniently located here in Silicon Valley instead of Detroit (?!?!? I know there is a perfectly logical story behind why MacHack was in Detroit that I would knowingly nod my head at while I was hearing, but I repeat: ?!?!?), and more focused on web technologies (Yahoo! APIs, specifically).

I went there right after work on Friday, checked in, and put my name on the “looking for teammates” whiteboard. There was free pizza, and then a concert outside by Beck. The concert was fine — there were a lot of hangers-on (hanger-ons?), folks who were there just for the concert — but I was distracted by brainstorming about what I would do for the veritable hack contest that was about to start. By the way, Beck seems to really be into marionettes. I do love a good puppet show.

I met up with a clever young whippersnapper by the name of Sandro who was also interested in using the web development tools that I have been using lately (“Django” — see http://djangoproject.com/) and we went through some ideas and finally settled on what he cleverly called Flick Rel8. It’s sort a license-platey name. It’s a game: we download pointers to a bunch of Flickr images that are labeled with popular tags. Then we show three images with tag A is a row, followed by a stack of four images with tags A, B, C, D in some random order. The user has to guess which of the four images has the same tag as the first three.

The tag is not displayed (although it is available as a hint). So you have to look at the images and figure out what they have in common… and then find a fourth image that has the same thing. It’s like the SAT, Flickr-style.

We spent a lot of time developing and not a lot trying it, so I still don’t know if it ends up being fun. I don’t think it was that fun with the data set we had, but I think you could make it fun, especially if you limited the tag list to a certain class of tags — maybe concrete nouns and adjectives. For example, “2006” is a pretty lame tag for this purpose.

The conference staff showed us clips from that indicated that every local news channel had a story about the conference.. Yahoo! must have some killer publicists. One dorky reporter disclosed the difference between “hackers” who are talented computer folk who mean no harm and “crackers” who try to break into computers. The irony was that he was the biggest cracker of them all.

Then at 3 PM, our hours of manic work came to an end. The 55-some odd teams took turns displaying their hacks. We were number 32. I started off with a joke that I knew would work with that audience, and indeed, it got a big laugh. It’s interested being able to not appear nervous in front of a crowd and to be able to be confident about getting a laugh.

All the stories had this spin that seemed to try to make the conference seem elite, or cool, or possibly even hip. I think Beck being there added to that sheen. I dunno, I think nerds are by definition not very cool. See Paul Graham’s essay on this. But so what? Why can’t things just be what they are?

All in all, a good time. I am exhausted, and I did not even stay up all night, as some people did (many camped out on the lawn). I met some good people. And I got to hack on computers, a thing I’ve been enjoying a lot more of lately.

MySpace Dot Count

Being a computer hacker and software guy, I pay attention. As you may know, I think as far as software goes, MySpace is the web equivalent of Microsoft Windows: ugly, cluttered with awkward functionality, bug-ridden, but everyone uses it because everyone else does. Well, except I don’t use Microsoft Windows. If only Friendster were compatible with MySpace.

An example of the just plain stupidity of MySpace struck me today as I looked at my comments list. At the top of the list was the notation

“Display 37 of 36 Comments”

I didn’t bother to count if I had 36 or 37 comments (or who knows, maybe some other number), but how do you manage to get the “page count” of comments larger than the “total number” of comments? That’s a special kind of carelessness.

Backpedalling to Philadelphia

The other night I noticed that my TiVo had recorded another couple of episodes of “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia” (as recommended here last week), so I sat down with warm anticipation and watched them.

Wouldn’t you know, these episodes were much more difficult to watch and much more unpleasant and difficult to recommend. I think if I had seen them first, I would not have recommended the show.

Having seen four episodes now, I have noticed a common thread. Each episode has a plot based around a taboo subject. The first episode dealt with welfare, unemployment insurance, and crack use. The second dealt with intergenerational sex as revenge (sleeping with an adversary’s parent). I found both amusing. Then I saw two the other night. One was about coaching children to use dirty tricks to win at basketball, including being violent. The second was about boxing and street fighting, and also including a lot of very unpleasant violence.

Maybe it’s me — I prefer sex, drugs and laziness to violence. But what do you expect — I am a liberal.

I’ll keep watching.

Salty Dog

I work on the top floor in a glorious building on an immaculate campus in the middle of nowhere, although technically in Redwood City. We have spectacular views of various cities on the so-called peninsula, but most notably, views of several shallow rectangular holding ponds that for months have been filled with the strangest reddish water I’d seen for some time.(A satellite view courtesy of Google is here. Our building is in the zoo of buildings just above the weird pink ponds, the second from the left.)

These ponds are owned by Cargill Salt. I guess they fill them with water from the bay, then let them dry. All summer long, I’d been staring at the ponds as they turned redder and redder and seemed to get shallower and shallower. The other day, I noticed some small white mounds sticking out of the ponds. I assumed they were salt but did not think much of it. I did notice the colour of the ponds changing dramatically that day at work, but thought it was just a trick of the light as the sun was reflecting off it directly.

After the long Labour Day weekend, I drove to work and was started to see the pond all white. I was in Utah last summer, and drove through the Great Salt Flats, and this was pretty much exactly the same. In the matter of just a few hours, the last of the water dried up, leaving behind pure salt flats. It looked like it had snowed in September.

It made me want to get out my ice skates and give it a go.

It’s Often Sunny in California Too

I was talking to someone recently about one of my favourite shows “The Office” suggesting that it’s the best show on TV, and this person countered with “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”. I had not seen this show. I had seen the ads on MySpace, and since to me MySpace seems to generally hawk brain-dead, IQ-lowering pablum, I assume that the show would not be for me. However, after this respectful suggestion, I thought I would give it a chance.So I set up Mr. TiVo to record every episode (the so-called “Season’s Pass”) and came back to it (“him”?) later and found two episodes. I watched one last night which I found interesting (the brother and sister character get addicted to crack in a silly, but surprisingly credible way). I watched the other today, which I found most compelling.

I’m happy to report that I found the shows to be original, clever, interesting and, indeed, funny. I’m still new to the show so I have trouble telling the male characters apart because they all look so generically similar, but I’m sure this problem will work itself out. And I will tune in again.

I was also surprised to hear the “s” word, unedited, several times in each episode. On commercial TV. Sure, it’s cable (which is the only reason it’s legal), but there is advertising. There are advertisers willing to buy ads in a show with swearing! The future is great.

In summary: watch a couple episodes and see what you think. If you’ve seen it, please comment with your assessment.

I was on TV and it was OK

One recent Thursday afternoon, I was working in a cafe on my work at “home” day. This place has free wireless, so there were quite a few folks with computers scattered about with both Macs and PCs. (I use a Mac.)

Then this guy came in to say that they were filming a story for channel 2 news about the Apple battery recall. He went around to each person individually and explained that they were going to take some background shots for the story and asked if it would be okay to be included. I was fine with it. For the next hour, the cameraman did as he explained. I also saw the reporter talking with someone, presumably about the story.

The next day at work, a coworker came up to me and said that he saw me on the TV news the previous night. It was just for a few seconds, but he says he pointed at the screen and said “I know that guy!” (I didn’t have the heart to mention that I was there during office hours.)

This is the second time I’ve been on TV news this year. In May, a coworker told me that she saw me on TV waiting at the starting line in the Bay to Breakers. So far, I’m handling the paparazzi with cool indifference.

The purpose of this entry really is twofold. The first is to brag about how I’ve been on TV. The second is to wonder out loud why people brag about being on TV even in such incidental instances such as this. It was really just a matter of being in the right place at the right time; I didn’t really “deserve” it.

Okay, sure I wasn’t home, which increases my broadcast odds (not a lot of filming goes on inside my apartment) — and I guess both times I was at a place or event which the media considers a place “to see and be seen” (a concept I find abhorrent). But the pride one feels and the recognition one gets seems all out of proportion to the actual significance. It’s as though fame (lame as it is in this circumstance) is an intrinsic currency to humanity that is universally understood and ingrained over years of social evolution. That is, people have evolved to value fame even if it’s just for fame’s sake.

The relatively recent invention of television (relative to how long people have been around) increases this fame exposure by an order of magnitude. I’m not sure social evolution has been able to catch up. People exaggerate the significance of being on television. Except since everyone does it, it’s not really an exaggeration. C’mon, when I say “Hey I was on TV”, don’t you just for a moment sit up and think, “Oh wow, pretty cool.”

Please everyone, welcome me to world of attention whore-dom.