February 2004

Yesterday was pretty busy. I ditched Farsi in the morning in favor of sleeping, headed over to my grandparents’ house for Thursday interviews (which didn’t happen — we had lunch and I played the doting grandson extraordinaire (ie, Mac consultant for free)), headed to Econ lecture, handed off the tickets to the John Caroll lecture to Sunaree , and finally met up with Garett for a focus group on Cal Dining. In exchange for “dinner” (read: two pieces of mediocre…

Wow. I sit before my laptop, ready to write about this really interesting Salon article about life inside the Green Zone in Baghdad, and my iTunes playlist pulls up Percy Grainger’s Colonial Song at random. Heh. Even funnier is that this song, written by an Australian, is a slow, lyrical tune which seems to me to express longing and homage to his homeland — which I doubt is much how the CPA employees feel that Jen Banbury writes about. Anyway,…

An LJer from Minnesota had a neat idea: Today a coworker of mine had a thought to send flowers to a random couple waiting in line at SF city hall. He called a florist and they agreed to do it. He told them to deliver to any couple — it didn’t matter who — standing in line to get married, with his blessing. The card will read simply “With love, from Minneapolis, Minnesota.” Once they understood, they were very touched…

Wow! The OCF is back up!

So I forgot — I have an extra free ticket (UCB students [or people who can pass as students, like Maria]) for the event tomorrow night in Zellerbach, with John Carroll (one of the editors at the LA Times) and Michael Krasny, the host of KQED-Forum. 7:30 pm tomorrow night. Any takers?

Lots of things from the blogosphere today that are noteworthy (in the order I read them): Boing Boing posted about a study about free Wi-Fi, confirming what I had suspected, which is that free Wi-Fi leads to more business, and pay Wi-Fi leads to less business. When I lived in Palo Alto over the summer, I used to go to La Crème de Café on Loma Verde and Middlefield Ave. because they had free Wi-Fi (and also pay Wi-Fi, which…

Darpa Offers No Food for Thought: Soldiers’ moms will no doubt be horrified. But the Pentagon is looking into ways for GIs to fight for up to five days — without eating a single meal. During a mission, soldiers in the field typically don’t have the time, or the inclination, to chow down. That lack of food can affect their battlefield performance. So Darpa, the U.S. military’s far-out research arm, wants scientists to figure out if soldiers can operate at…

I’ve been listening to Mozart’s 9th Piano Concerto, and I skipped over the second movement (Andante) because I think that it’s boring, so I have a question to pose to all you music-fans of all stripes: Why is it so difficult to write slow music that is powerful and good without being cheezy and/or boring? The main classical pieces that I can think of that are slow and also good are: “Colonial Song” – Percy Grainger “Amazing Grace” – Traditional…

Wow, two pentaquerys at once, from mifune and from odd_dog, respectively: [If you want your own pentaquery, let me know in comments.]

I’m about to head out for LAX, after having about an hour-long discussion with my parents about my future and present. Basically, what I gather is that they don’t know what I do, and will never be satisfied and so I’ll just continue doing what I’m doing and when I win a Pulitzer, then I’ll laugh at them. Until then, I’ll just keep my own successes to myself. Argh, I know they mean well, but they annoy me to no…