General

Well, I got in my third chapter of my thesis draft in this afternoon. Read all 63 pages of its working draft glory here if you’re really interested. I had a great lunch with today in the City, at a place called Henry’s Hunan, just off 2nd, in the SoMa district. That was fun and I ate a lot. And it was spicy, too. 🙂 As Drezner points out, there’s some problems going down in the EU: Less than two…

I would post more, but I have to finish copying out this Farsi essay and it’s late. Cake was fun. Too short, but their new album sounds promising. Sacto seems like a cool place. True Love Coffeehouse rocks. I’m going to be going to NY while I’m in Hartford, and the j-school is paying for it, covering something having to do with the War on Terror, for my J298 class. More on this as details become available. Full thesis action…

No further news from the grad school front. In other randomness, though, I ran into David P. Jacob on campus today walking out of Barrows Hall. He was dealing with some bureaucratic stuff about graduating, even though he’s not actually walking (he’ll be in Germany). He, and his Persian girlfriend Maryam and I had lunch at Ruen Pair, a great Thai restaurant in Albany. It’s always good to run into old friends. I’ve finally finished my rough Farsi translation of…

So confirming what I heard on NPR this morning, The Eyeranian says that the Iranian state news has reported that bin Laden has been captured for awhile now, even though the US and Pakistan deny it. As he says: I would normally ignore this, however it is hard to forget how the same source reported on the arrest of Saddam way ahead of all other news agencies. Besides, with the U.S. abandoning everything in Afghanistan outside of Kabul to tribal…

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…

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…

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…