Sorry, website is down for a bit. -Sha

Archive for July, 2003

Monkeys Gone Retarded

Tuesday, July 29th, 2003

All of you have probably heard the story about scientists giving monkeys typewriters to see if they would turn out Shakespeare. Basically, they just banged on the keyboards and smeared them with feces. Well, it seems that somebody at Stanford has decided to do a similar experiment: what if we give Stanford students the to simultaneously e-mail almost everyone on campus? The result was pretty much virtual feces smeared all over our inboxes.

It began yesterday when a student sent an e-mail to several addresses, including one that included almost everyone on campus, regarding a phone bill error. Another student e-mailed back to all the addresses saying that they had received the first e-mail in error. A third did the same, still including all the addresses. About this time, people realized that their e-mails were being delivered campus-wide, but instead of taking this as a cue to sit on their hands and wait it out, they decide to take advantage of it. Over the next hour, 16 e-mails were sent to the list with things like “Everyone join the band!”, “Why am I receiving these e-mails?”, and “Kindly stop replying to all.” It was a sad day.

In other news, this past weekend Mariel and I went to the Gilroy Garlic Festival, which was really hot and quite garlicky. I even tried garlic ice cream, which tastes exactly like you would imagine garlic ice cream would taste. Also, congrats to Brendan, who is starting a new job tomorrow! We went to Oasis burgers last night to celebrate, where I worked towards my first heart attack with chili cheese fries and onion rings. Good times.

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Memory

Friday, July 25th, 2003

The problem with updating this site so infrequently, is that by the time I actually sit down to do it, I’ve forgotten what it was I wanted to write about in the first place. So instead, I’ll just ramble incoherently (even more so than usual) until I get tired.

Work has been going pretty well so far, although I seem to be working faster than I should, because they keep running out of things to have me do. In the evenings I’ve actually been doing stuff, which is a nice change. Not really exciting things, but going to coffee shops and bookstores at least gets me out of the apartment and away from computers.

I noticed during college that I almost never remembered my dreams, and I was never sure why. But recently I read an article that said that when you are sleep-deprived (like I was throughout college,) your body skips lighter sleep, when dreams occur, and goes straight into deep sleep. So I figure that I wasn’t remembering many of my dreams because I wasn’t really having very many. So now that I have to get to work every morning, I actually go to sleep at a decent time, and can usually squeeze in 7 or 8 hours. As a result, I have a virtual cornucopia of dreams every night. Some of the most recent ones I can remember are getting my tongue pierced with a hammer and chisel, being chased through a park by two lions (one male and one female), and driving around the city in plastic Playskool cars. I like to see them as making up for 5 years of lost dreams.

Here’s something that I was wondering about as I drove to work today: when I’m by myself, to save gas, I tend to drive with the windows open rather than use the air conditioner. The problem is that with the wind blowing through the open windows, I have to turn the radio up really high in order to hear it. So my question is: am I destroying my hearing by doing this? It seems that either the sound of the super-loud wind or the super-loud radio would be harmful to my hearing. Or do the two super-loud sounds somehow magically cancel each other out like matter and anti-matter, sparing me a lifetime of hearing aids?

Well, I think that was incoherent enough.

Oh, before I go, as an experiment in “Why Does Google Like My Page So Much?” I’m including a link to Albert Kuo. He has a super awesome page. His name is Albert Kuo.

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Time

Friday, July 25th, 2003

Seriously, I don’t know how people with jobs find the time to update their websites with any sort of regularity. After I get home from a day of sitting in front of a computer, one of the last things I want is to sit in front of another computer to update this site, and read comments from people calling me a bitch. On that note, I’m signing off now. More to come later.

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Mmm…donuts…

Friday, July 18th, 2003

On the way to work today I passed a Entenmann’s semi truck with a 10-foot high picture of a chocolate donut on the side of the trailer, and now I really really want a chocolate donut.

Damn you, Entenmann’s!

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Apartment

Monday, July 14th, 2003

Mariel and I had spent the past couple weeks trying to find an apartment in the area. We had been looking on Rent.com, and we’d found some pretty nice places, but then our friend Paul told us that he had a vacancy next door to him. It was in Redwood City (north of Stanford, for all you non-Bay Area folks,) and was a ginormous 1200 square feet, 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom place. We went to see it and we really liked it, so we turned in our applications last week. Later that day, the realtor for the apartment, Joan, called us and told us that a woman had offered to not only move in immediately (we’re not moving until mid-August,) but also pay the first year’s rent up front. Of course we couldn’t do this, so we had to give up the place.

In the meantime, we found a nice apartment in Mountain View (south of Stanford) and decided to apply for that place. Of course, the day after we put down our security deposit, Joan calls us and tells us that it turns out that the woman who had offered to pay the first year’s rent had several bankruptcies, so that if we still wanted the place, it was ours. This put us in a brief dilemma, but we eventually stuck with the apartment in Mountain View, mostly because it was $150 dollars/month cheaper.

I’m satisfied with our decision, if not only for the fact that we are within walking distance of downtown Mountain View, home to many a cheap Asian restauarant. Mmm… Pho at 2 a.m…. Just call me fatty.

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I’m Back

Monday, July 14th, 2003

Well, it certainly has been some time since I’ve posted here. My real cue to get back into it is the fact that Peter has posted more often than I have, a sure sign of the coming apocalypse.

So probably the biggest thing that has happened is that I started at EA. As it turns out, I am not going to be working on the super sekret project I thought I was going to be working on, and have instead been consumed by the studio ameoba that is the Bond team. Of course, I didn’t know this until the day I started, so I was quite literally left behind after new-hire orientation with nowhere to go. Eventually I found my home in my second floor cubicle, complete with a swanky new Dell machine and dual LCD monitors. I am technically still in the Central Technologies group, but at the moment I am doing tools work for Bond. Things have been going well, and I’ve been doing some actual work, which is always satisfying.

Over the weekend, Mariel and I also signed the lease for an apartment. More on this later. Besides that, I went to Buddy and Ashley’s housewarming party, where I got to see a bunch of the other interns from last summer. Anita was also there, and I was suprised to find out that she has been working on campus for the past three weeks, unbeknownst to me. Of course, seeing as she works “normal” 9-5 hours, and I don’t get home until later than that, we might have a hard time running into each other. She did let me know that there is “at least one other” woman engineer at EA. I’m going to start a club. I can be president and vice president.

Other than that, the week has been pretty routine: get up, go to work, come home from work, eat dinner, be amazed at how tired I am, go to sleep. Rinse and repeat.

Finally, I’d like to congratulate Eric for being the 300th comment to this site. You get nothing but the satisfaction that you are in some very, very bad company.

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Sales

Monday, July 7th, 2003

Lady at the Estee Lauder makeup counter: “So where are you going to be working?”
Me: “Electronic Arts. It’s a video game company.”
Lady: “Oh. What will you be doing? Sales?”

Yeah.

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