sha v 4.0

Over the summer I was interviewed by some woman at Information Week. I thought she was going to ask me about my internship at EA, but she ended up talking to me about communication, the job market, and what it’s like to be a woman in computer science. I’m only quoted a couple times (as Patricia, no less,) and they kind of make me sound anal and money-grubbing. Ah, the truth hurts, doesn’t it? In my defense, though, I don’t ever recall saying I wanted a MS because the pay is higher. Then again, I don’t really remember what I did this morning either, so anything is possible.

Some music videos I know I don’t like. In fact, I may very well hate them. But, like car crashes, sometimes I just can’t look away. Case in point: I just watched Justin Timberlake’s Girlfriend back-to-back with Christina Aguilera’s Dirrty. The longest 8 minutes of my life. To clense myself, perhaps I’ll follow Steve-O from Jackass’ example and pour Tabasco sauce in my eyes.

The one bright moment in the Dirrty video was when I was sure I heard Christina say: “You can tell when the music starts to drop; that’s when we take it to the Pokemon” but it turns out she says “parking lot.”

I choose you Skanky Ho!

Just spent a total of around 8 or 9 hours working on an EE282 problem set. It would be AWESOME if the TAs would at least proofread those garbled pieces of brain-suck before they ran off 150 copies.

In other news, I had lunch with the KOK team today since Adrian, mentor extraordinaire, is leaving EA to start his own game company. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep in touch with him since he was probably one of the best people I’ve ever worked with — brilliant but not condescending. In the CS department, you usually only get your choice of one. In a related thought, hearing a British person say “Naughty Dog” is a pleasure all should experience.

Today I broke the 1000-spam barrier! Woo and hoo. Some of my favorites, “B.r.i.t.n.e.y S.p.e.a.r N.a.k.e.d” (perhaps Britney Spears’ homely half-sister), and of course “New discovery ends spam the easy way!” Hopefully I’ll hit that 2000-spam mark in a few months. I can only hope.

As an addendum to one of my previous post, another reason that I would like to be a celebrity is that I can sell all my old unwanted clothes and people will pay big money for them.

Finally, I shall end with a quote from my favoritest red-haired Scottish singer, Shirley Manson. Here are her thoughts on Avril Lavigne:

Last night while “working” on our 242 problem set, Brendan and I caught an episode of The Osbournes, which I had never seen until then. What a fantastically strange show. The episode dealt with Jack going off to some “hippie” camp retreat with his school, Ozzy going on some sort of promotional tour which involved signing women’s breasts and going on TRL (not at the same time,) and Kelly having her 17th birthday party, complete with contortionist. How come I didn’t get a contortionist at my birthday party? Anyway, one of my favorite parts was Sharon telling Kelly she was stupid for getting a tattoo, while Ozzy sat by with his arms covered in ink. He did give some good advice, though: “If you’re trying to be different, don’t get a tattoo; everyone f**king has tattoos!” The best part, though, was trying to figure out just what the heck Ozzy was saying. Most of the time it sounded like, “[bleep] [bleep] mmrrffubledriv…” and he would sort of just fade away. All in all, a half-hour well spent (much more so than the 242 problem set,) and it is sure to be part of my regular Sunday night viewing.

My dad visited me today since he’s in the area for a business trip. We had a nice lunch at Max’s, and he complimented me and Mariel on our most excellent apartment. Not in those words, but the sentiment was the same.

Now for some more New Mexico news. While we lie awake at night, worrying about just what is becoming of the world, we can feel safe knowing that the scientists at Los Alamos have figured out a new way to blow ourselves up without uranium or plutonium. Rock on New Mexico.

Today is Moo’s 25th (!) birthday, so for all of you who know her, give her a ring and tell her how old she is.

An interesting thing happened the other day. I was sitting in CS205 listening to Ron Fedkiw go on (and on) about something called the Singular Value Decomposition. I was taking notes brainlessly as I often do, when he finished writing on the fifth chalkboard and stopped. He turned to the class and said, “This is all of linear algebra right here.” As he paused for what I can only assume was dramatic effect, I thought to myself, “Hey, that’s pretty neat.” Neat… NEAT?? I think that the fact that all of linear algebra can be reduced to five chalkboards of illegible scrawl is neat. Could it be that I found this class interesting? Is this what they call intellectual excitement? Was I finally understanding what Fedkiw was trying to say, thus quelling my urge to jump up in the middle of class and yell, “WHAT’S THE POINT??”

…Probably not. But it was fun while it lasted.

In unrelated news, while most of the country worries about snipers, nuclear weapons, and war, the good folks down in New Mexico have much more serious matters to attend to: cattle rustlers. God Bless the USA.

From her October 1st diary entry:

I want to be her when I grow up. But perhaps without the vampirically pale skin.

I consider myself a pretty nice person. I try to be pleasant to most people, unless they’re rude to me first. So I’ve decided that I want to be a celebrity just so I can be nice to my fans when I meet them. Think about it — all a celebrity has to do is to be nice to her fans, and bam — instant immortality. Even better is that celebrity standards of “nice” are completely different than the standards that the rest of the world upholds. To be considered “nice” by the public is basically to just not be a complete ass to everyone. In otherwords, all I would have to do is extend basic human courtesy to my fans. People would write articles about me, dedicate websites to me, and tell everyone they know that when they met me, I was so nice to them, i.e. I didn’t kick them in the shins or swear too loudly in their face. One bad thing about my being a celebrity is that I’m afraid that when I went on late-night talk shows, I would be one of those people who doesn’t interview well, or I would be just plain boring.

In slightly related news, I thoroughly enjoyed this quote from Pink on her MTV diary: “If there’s a girl in front of you in line for the bathroom, don’t give her attitude; ask her if she needs help wiping.”

Followup:

After some searching and downloading, I discovered it’s Victory at Ed Parker’s from the Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story soundtrack by Randy Edelman. Take a listen to the clip; it is indeed most triumphant. So triumphant that Olympian Elvis Stojko skated to it. Now if that isn’t triumph, I don’t know what is.

If anyone can tell me what the music is that’s playing with the current “American Dreams” commercial on NBC, you win a prize. It’s probably the most overused music in tv spots/movie trailers when they want to convey triumphant…ness. Anyway, I’m just curious what it is.

For the musically inclined of you, it goes:
(starting at the A above middle C)
A-G-A-C A-G-A-C A-G-A-C F-E-D

Ummm….yeah.

Edit: For the many of you searching for music to a specific trailer, soundtrack.net has a listing of music for most movie trailers.

Edit 2: Look below for info about the music from “The Hours” trailer!

Edit 3: Look below for a link to the piano piece from “The Hours” trailer!

I finally bit the bullet and moved my whole site over to this here domain. New features include the ability to add comments to any posts (so now I can be sad when I see all the Comments(0) on every page), a list of the mp3s I’m listening to updated in real-time, and, um, other geeky stuff that nobody but me is excited about. I went ahead and added some old old posts, such as the classic “Can’t I take a picture of me studying?” conversation with Mariel, and proof Satan shops at Safeway. For the older posts, I didn’t have a timestamp, so I just pretended I wrote them all at exactly 12:00:00 p.m.

Anyway, take a look around, and let me know what you think! (*cough cough* comments *cough cough*)