don't you want to know what kind of MUD it was?

Chatting with my brother in my kitchen yesterday, while making a salad:

Me: "I met a new friend on Friday. She used to program MUDs, and now runs a startup making an MMO."

Tom: "Does she have a younger sister?"

Me: "I don't think so. Actually, come to think of it, she's your type physically. She's chinese, with long straight hair, and really skinny."

Tom: "Her younger sister is?"

Me: "No! She doesn't have a younger sister!"

Tom: "Bah, so useless!" [gets up and leaves]

Chef Charlie's new restaurant

Charlie, former head chef at Google, is opening a restaurant at Town and Country Village in Palo Alto. It's called Calafia.

I managed to elicit an invite to his Friends and Family pre-opening tasting event this past Sunday. This was very exciting for me.

My reservation was at 9pm, and by 5:30pm I was ravenous. I cooked some pasta with meat sauce to tide myself over.


My handiwork, in progress.


Tom gave me advice on cooking this meal.

I asked him, "Which do you think will taste better, this pasta or dinner at Charlie's restaurant?"

This was supposed to be a joke, because Charlie is a famous chef with a cookbook of his own recipes, whereas I can't even get my own mother to acknowledge that I can cook.

But Tom thought carefully, trying to come up with an answer that wouldn't hurt my feelings. Finally he said, "If this meal is better, that would mean we can open our own restaurant. So I think the other one will taste better."

Finally the ordained hour arrived, and I drove to Calafia.


The interior space just inside the door.


Bar area. The font on the wall boards (over-exposed in this photo) reminds me of Google cafe fonts, for some reason.


Lovely open space for the kitchen.


I had the fiery bbq pork rice bowl (with brown rice, yay!). It was great.


Happy.

It was better than my pasta, I can tell you.

true friendship = responding in the middle of a puzzle hunt

Something came up that frustrated me. I sent a venting email to Dan. Then, because he came online the next minute:

niniane: i am frustrated!
niniane: just want to express my frustration through as many mediums as possible
niniane: next i will send you a sms
niniane: and then skywrite it
niniane: with flares
niniane: in the night
dan: Lol
dan: MIT mystery hunt is this weekend, I'm in the middle of it
dan: I validate your frustration!
niniane: sorry
niniane: go go go
niniane: go beavers!
niniane: caltech beavers only
niniane: do not go, MIT beavers
dan: [silence]

or maybe a balanced binary tree

At breakfast, I was chatting with "Lenny" about meetings. In particular, we discussed meetings that leave you feeling drained vs. ones that don't take up energy.

Lenny: "It's different when you're meeting with someone new. That's more draining."

Me: "That's true. Because you are creating a new entry in your memory, rather than appending to an existing entry."

Lenny: "Yes, it's expensive to make a new entry."

Me: "Deletion is also time-consuming."

Lenny: "Human memory must be a sorted linked list."

yelp elite

Tom: "Are you registered on yelp?"

Me: "Yup."

Tom: "Are you elite?"

Me: "No, that would take too much time."

Tom: "But you satisfy two of the three criteria embodied by all yelp elite."

Me: "What, female and ...?"

Tom: "Female, Asian, and angsty. Seriously, go to any yelp restaurant page and read the elite review. You'll see that I'm right. Or in rare cases, the reviewer is a guy, but if you click on his photo and scroll to the right, he'll be standing next to an Asian woman who probably writes all of his reviews for him."

just in time for new year's resolutions

I think it's good when the president serves as a role model.

The paparazzi snapped a photo of Obama in swimming trunks. Now guys are taking his photo into the gym as inspiration.

I saw a news clip of a Midwestern-looking man asking a personal trainer, "Can I go from here (gesturing toward his gut) to here (gesturing at Obama photo)? Is there hope?"

"There's hope," said the trainer, studying the photo. "There's hope."

:)



Maybe men will copy his haircut too. Instead of "the Rachel", we'll have "the Barack".

group weddings and celebrating the elderly

Over Christmas I visited a friend in China. We first spent a couple days in the city of Kunming.


I found a random hotel through Google Maps. It had Victorian statues of Venus all about the grounds.


My hotel was home to a "group wedding" tour group. All these couples came on this tour to get married. I've never seen this before. The tour guide provided bouquets, corsages, red scarves, and red umbrellas in case of rain. (Red is the lucky wedding color in China.) Later they were all going to their honeymoon in Lijiang.

I wonder if group wedding tours happen in other countries. I can't imagine it taking off in the States.


This mango juice stand is cute, from the name "Mango Tango", to the 2-d grid of mangoes in glass cases.


Bamboo patch in the Western Hills.

...

I liked seeing how Chinese culture respects the elderly. The Kunming newspaper ran a promotion in collusion with the local hospital, offering free glaucoma operations to anyone who has celebrated their diamond wedding anniversary (60 years). Gold wedding anniversaries get a huge discount, silver gets a small discount, etc.

The newspaper kept referring to elderly women as "little old ladies" in an affectionate way. It was sweet.

customer service around the world

A few days ago, I purchased a VPS plan (virtual private server) for a fun site I'm making with a college friend. The VPS company has a 7-day moneyback guarantee, which is common since people want to test connection speeds, uptime, reliability.

I was not happy with one aspect, so I asked for my money back. To my surprise, the company started arguing. I am used to US service, and this company is based in the UK, so maybe that is the reason for the different expectations. In the US, you can return shoes to Nordstroms after 3 months without a receipt.

I recall one British friend saying that customer service in America is so fakely sweet that it discomfits her. Is this just a culture difference then? Are the Brits actually happier with their tougher customer service reps?

It seems that China is moving toward the US model. Chinese stores used to be pretty gruff, but in recent times I keep hearing them say, "The customer is God".

collapsing the waveform

Last night, my macbook started having short freezes, and iPhoto wouldn't launch. I rebooted. The start sequence got stuck at the apple logo loading screen. Many reboots (safe mode, taking out and replacing battery, etc) all stayed at this screen.

I decided to take it to the Apple Store. Best case: running a disk utility would repair the error and make things good as new in 10 minutes. Worse: the logic board is broken, but no data loss. Even worse: the hard drive is hosed.

All morning I found myself mentally assessing the probabilities of each, hoping for a good outcome.

In late afternoon, I went to my appointment at the Apple Genius Bar. They connected an external hard drive and quickly declared that my hard drive failed, such that the partition is unreadable. "Your data is gone," they said cheerfully, to make sure I understood.

As I walked out of the store, I was surprised to find that I felt better. This was one of the worse outcomes. But now my mental background processes could start cataloguing the list of apps I need to reinstall, and non-backed up scripts to rewrite. Collapsing the waveform brought its own relief.

I think it's due to my myers-briggs being a J rather than a P. If I were a P, perhaps I would prefer the time of innocence, before knowing with certainty that my hard drive is toast.

especially if you taught them using emacs

Today I received an email where the sig was very amusing:

If you give someone a program, you will frustrate them for a day;
if you teach them how to program, you will frustrate them for a lifetime.
--- Anonymous

I showed it to my programmer friend, and we both fell about laughing.

crumpets

Keith: "The XX bakery has new management, and it's not as good as before. One of the three original founders died from a heart attack."

Me: "Oh, that's too bad."

Keith: "His name was on the lease so his wife or girlfriend kicked out the other two, and took it over."

Me: "That's terrible! Was she his wife or his girlfriend?"

Keith: "Both."

Me: "He was married and had a mistress?"

Keith: "Yes."

Me: "So which one took over the lease?"

Keith: "They did it together."

Me: "Wow. Well, I guess they had similar tastes."

Keith: "United by their grief and greed."

Me: "Like many a capitalistic venture."

doormat decision

My townhouse came with a doormat, which is now at least four years old. My brother calls it "the pile of unidentifiable material which used to be a doormat".

I've narrowed down my decision to three choices.

A. Throw it away, and have no doormat at all.

B. Buy this amusing doormat, which may quickly get dirty as people wipe their feet on it:


C. Buy a normal-looking doormat, like this:


Suggestions?

chair proof

My brother is moving into my townhouse. We're going to be housemates for the next three months, potentially longer.

Yesterday we loaded up his Accord with small furniture pieces. Around 8pm, we began stuffing his computer chair into the front passenger seat.



Me: [after a couple minutes of pushing] "We got three of the wheels in. By induction, we should be able to get all five."

Tom: "Induction is awesome."

Both of us: [shoving against the chair]

Tom: "Though I'd say we're using the brute force method more."

$

I was IM-ing with my friend John about choices for health insurance, and he said something I found funny:

"I am what is known as 'bad with money', i.e. my math skills are great until I see a dollar sign."

This reminded me of something he said a few years ago:

John: My checking account is almost overdrawn.

Me: How come this is happening now when it never did before?

John: Well, I used to have a system of checks and balances, in that I would check my balance.

my doctor's story

Today I went for an annual physical from my doctor at Kaiser.

The actual physical took three minutes, and we spent twenty minutes talking. My doctor is a chinese woman in her 40s.

When she was my age, she was working at a Berkeley medical lab as a technician. She wasn't satisfied with the work, so she decided to take the medical board exam to be qualified to practice medicine in the US. She quit her job, and lived off savings for a year while studying.

She had the knowledge from medical school in China, but her english was rough. After a year, she took the exam, and failed by one point. But this gave her courage that after another year, she would be able to pass.

She said it was stressful sometimes, studying and not remembering english vocabulary, looking it up and not comprehending the definition, wondering if she should instead spend her time getting a boyfriend.

At the end of the two years, she passed the exams, and embarked on the road to practicing as a doctor. Later she married a chinese friend she'd known from Berkeley.

I was really moved by the story. I was planning to switch from Kaiser HMO to Cigna PPO, but now I'm wavering because I like my doctor so much.

poem from my brother

From: Tom Wang

I wrote you a lovely haiku – this is what happened when I was bored last night and surfing the internet.

Curiosity
What’s This ‘Two Girls One Cup’?
Traumatized Brother

funny hacking conversation

This hacker chat transcript that Alipé found is really funny. I am LOL'ing.

<bitchchecker> shut up i hack you
<Elch> ok, i’m quiet, hope you don’t show us how good a hacker you are ^^
<bitchchecker> tell me your network number man then you’re dead
<Elch> Eh, it’s 129.0.0.1
<Elch> or maybe 127.0.0.1
<Elch> yes exactly that’s it: 127.0.0.1 I’m waiting for you great attack
<bitchchecker> in five minutes your hard drive is deleted
<Elch> Now I’m frightened
<bitchchecker> shut up you’ll be gone
<bitchchecker> i have a program where i enter your ip and you’re dead

fobby lol

A reader pointed me to the sites mymomisafob.com and mydadisafob.com. These are so funny!

no need for expensive birthday wishes:

Me: Happy birthday Dad!
Dad: Thank you.
Me: What did —
Dad: T-Mobile have no more minutes, call me tonight when it’s free. [hangs up]

Self-celebratory text message:

Dad: happy birth to me!
Me: sorry, dad…i knew it was your birthday, but i didn’t have a chance to call you before class
Dad: oh ok i just want you to share glorious happy birth!

weight gain:

Dad: People get old, get fat; gray hair, move slow….that’s life; young ones/next generation take over.
Philip: ya
Philip: but you got fat really fast
Dad: ok, I’ll try to lose weight; it’s not easy; I get hungry.

low income voters against prop 8?

By current tallies, Prop 8 to eliminate gay marriage is leaning toward passing, 52% to 48%. It's disappointing.

You can see the voting broken down by age, gender, race, education on this CNN page.

As expected, the younger the voters, the more likely they are to oppose the proposition (i.e. favor gay marriage). The more educated they are, the more likely they are to oppose it. The highest income brackets are more likely to oppose it than middle-income brackets.

However, I find it interesting that the lowest income brackets (<$30k) also oppose the proposition. Why would this be? It goes against the education correlation.

The only explanation I could concoct is that perhaps younger voters are more likely to earn less than $30,000, so the income is more correlated to age than to education.

uWink

There's a new restaurant in downtown Mountain View, where you place orders via a computer monitor, and can play games while you wait.

Dan went there and said the games were horrible. He maintains that they are cheesy and not sociable enough. This made me curious, so I went with Sha-mayn the following week. We loved it!

I especially liked the trivia game.

A debate ensued between Dan and me. Spread over several conversations, we debated the merits of uWink. This culminated last Thursday in a bet.

The bet concerns whether the uWink company will go out of business within two years (10/30/2010). Dan bets that it will, and I bet that it will not. The loser will cook for the winner for one month.

Reza, who was eating dinner with us when we determined the bet, is the arbiter.

After we finalized the bet terms, the three of us jauntered over to uWink to watch the crowd. It was one-third full, not terrible for a weeknight. We noticed that it was about 70% Asians. The Asians were laughing, playing the games, having a great time. The non-Asians sat away from the computer monitors, looking bored as they chatted with each other.

Maybe uWink is an Asian thing.


Sha-mayn across the table from me.


Ordering via menu.


The "spicy" First Date game. (It's not very spicy.)


Sha-mayn took this photo of me.