Sleepy, brain-eating zombies

This is what happens when Seppo and I go out to nice events (in this case, our friend MJ’s wedding, which was beautiful and sweet):

Brains:

Photo credits: Gene Hsu.

IHTFP

Anyone familiar with MIT culture will know that IHTFP can stand for a lot of things. Two of the most common ones are: “I hate this f*ing place,” and “I have truly found paradise.”

Yeah, that second one sounds about right. I have a lot to say about the vacation, but that will come later, when I organize all the photos and my vacation journal. Mostly, Seppo and I agreed that it was one of the best weeks of our lives and that we definitely want to do it again. It feels like an affordable enough vacation that we could do this every year or so, on top of any other travelling we already plan to do.

You can see Max’s cabana on the right, and ours half obscured by his, just to its left. Note: Seppo is only wearing long pants because he thought he’d wear clothes that will let him arrive at SF in comfort, but it was too hot, so he changed back. I was actually standing ankle-deep in the water when I took this picture.

Everyday was in the low 80s. Early in the morning or late at night, it fell to around 77 degrees. The sun was hot and shining, but the ocean breezes kept us from getting uncomfortable. It was warm enough that we were usually just in our bathing suits, about 90% of the time there, hanging around in hammocks and jumping in the waves. The water was warm and crystal clear and clean.

All my life, I’ve dreamt of going somewhere where the water was clear, the sand was white, and the breezes were warm. This was all that and more. The sand was so incredibly fine and soft, like powder in many places. We played in the water everyday, trying to varying degrees of success to bodysurf. 🙂

The pictures can’t capture the true beauty and warmth of the place.

It was paradise.

Vacation, all I ever wanted

Seppo and I are leaving for Tulum, Mexico in a matter of hours. I stayed up converting a bunch of free pdf books to the wacky Sony Reader format, which was no fun on the Mac. In fact, the entire Mac experience has left a very bad taste in my mouth. Let’s hope it gets better.

I’m so glad for this little vacation. I have never been to Mexico! The pictures of the beach look just amazing.

We’ll be completely unreachable until Tuesday night! See you guys later.

Day 30

Where has the time gone?

We’ve had a visitor for the last 11 days. I just took Roopa to the airport this morning. It was really great having her here. We had a lot of time to just hang out and “chillax”. *cough* Since Lindsi is also unemployed at the moment — or, as she likes to say, in semi-retirement — there were a couple of days when the three of us just lazed about, not doing anything much but eating/cooking/talking about nothing in general.

On one of the more awesome days of many awesome days, Lindsi came over and basically forced me and Roopa to sit around while she cooked us butternut squash soup and dozens & dozens of ginger snaps. It was mind-boggling. I think that was last Tuesday.

Speaking of food, I made another batch of falafel & dark chocolate cupcakes on Monday (Lindsi made the frosting) and had Lindsi and Holly over. I really wanted Holly to sample this particular batch because I felt like I had finally achieved a cupcake that had intense chocolaty flavor. Many previous batches were dark and rich in color and even in smell, but this was the first batch that really asserted its chocolate flavor. I feel like with a couple of small tweaks (such as increasing the moisture level) and practice applying frosting in an attractive way, we are definitely close to having Holly & Mack’s wedding cupcakes. 🙂

Boy, we’ve been having car issues. Last week Thursday, the morning after Roopa came into town, we took the Insight into the Honda dealership to deal with a transmission issue that Insights were apparently having. This was covered under warranty, but ended up taking until Tuesday (which meant we couldn’t pick up the car until Wednesday morning) because of a part that needed to be ordered, which got delayed because of Monday being a holiday for most people. The good news is that the weird “judder” issue we had been seeing has been completely resolved now and that we also took the opportunity to get the minor maintenance it was past due for out of the way.

Unfortunately — or fortunately, based on how you look at it — our Honda Civic freaked out yesterday morning as Seppo, Roopa, and I were on our way to dim sum in Oakland Chinatown with Max and Leila, who were coming by Bart. We were supposed to pick up Max at Bart (Leila was coming in later to meet us at the restaurant), but just a couple of blocks away, the transmission seemed to die, resulting in us unable to come out of a stop at a traffic light. A little later, the transmission seemed to tentatively kick in for a bit, so Seppo decided to try to take it back to our neighborhood garage, while Roopa, Max, and I went on by foot to the restaurant to wait for Leila and Seppo.

In the end, Seppo was not able to make it all the way back, so he had to call AAA after all, which meant that he didn’t have time to join us for food. That was really nice of him to make the sacrifice of his time so that everyone else could still have a nice lunch. That is one of the many reasons Seppo is a fantastic human being. 🙂 I made sure to box up a bunch of dim sum for him to eat later.

He came back with the Mini, leading to a very old-fashioned-caper-in-a-small-car kind of time with all five of us piling into the car willy-nilly and heading back to the house, where Leila met Mobi for the first time, and where, subsequently, Mobi farted on everyone as he is wont to do, creating a most inhospitable environment.

The Civic issue basically meant that today, Seppo and I spent a ton of time doing the fuzzy math of how much we would be willing to put into the Civic for how many approximate more years of use, and weighing those numbers against getting a new car. This, of course, led to hours and hours of whittling down a list of cars against our personal requirements and reading reviews and ratings. Note to self: tell Holly to look into the Honda Fit (especially the 2009 model that will come out at the end of next year) if she likes the Yaris but wants 4 doors.

Yesterday, Patrick came up to join us for dinner. We hadn’t seen him in… man, I have no idea! Really, too long. He & Michelle are very far along in their pregnancy, so Michelle understandably could not join us. It’s too bad we couldn’t go down! If it weren’t for the dang Civic… We played some Wii games while waiting for the second slowest home food delivery we’ve experienced in Oakland, then gobbled up some decent-but-not great Italian food.

Tonight was dinner at the home of the newly-dubbed Team CUB a.k.a. Team COB, The Team Formerly Known As Team Uyen, Powered By Charles. We had a very flavorful dinner full of the kind of contrasting textures and flavors that I really enjoy in home cooked food. They had Vietnamese springs rolls and bun (rice noodles and meat & veggies with fish sauce). I just love the crunchy veggies and fragrant herbs. Even better than the food was their company, of course. 🙂 I will have to ask the team if their change in name is public knowledge now. *vague* *hedge*

On the health front, I’ve been doing pretty well at tracking my nutritional intake. I have been eating 5-8 servings of fruits & vegetables almost every day, drinking a lot of water, and keeping my snacking down to a minimum. I am definitely feeling less huffy when I go on long walks with Mobi and finish up on the Hill of Death near the house. I even managed to maintain a moderate weight loss even during Roopa’s visit. I generally find that having visitors equals eating out a lot, which equals rapid weight gain, at least in the recent years, but it was nice that I managed to keep going in the right direction.

On the book front, it’s been going very slowly because I never managed to make a commitment to participate this year. I can definitely finish this year still if I want to, since I have tons of time, but I have yet to decide I’m really in it. Strange, yeah?

On the family front, my sister told me that she’s somewhat hopeful that her husband may be able to finish up the family business stuff and move to the U.S. permanently by the end of the year. That would be great! We are all trying not to get our hopes up, but it is hard not to. He is going to be here for Thanksgiving and his bigger daughter’s birthday. We’ll have to send a present soon, so she’ll get it in time.

Rock Band is coming out midnight, Tuesday, November 20th! That means that tomorrow night, Seppo and I will foolishly huddle in the cold to wait in line to get it. Hee hee. We are a couple of dummies.

Day 19

Oh shoot! What have I been doing? I have no idea. I mean, I literally can’t remember what I did, say, last week. This is why I usually like keeping a blog, because it freaks me out when days pass and I can’t account for large periods of my time. It’s creepy, yo.

November 1st, I kicked off a “Get Healthy/Lose Weight/Eat Better” regiment. I also kicked off NaNoWriMo. The health thing has been going pretty well: cardio 4 days a week, attempt feeble strength training, and walk longer & further with Mobi; record my weight and calorie consumption daily so I know what nutrients I am missing & curtail excessive eating of nutritionally vacant things, eat 5 or more servings of fruits/vegetables a day, swap some of my red meats for legumes and poultry, and make sure I’m on track for my end-of-year goals.

NaNoWriMo is going slowly this year, but I vow to catch up. I think because I didn’t publicly commit to it this year, I haven’t felt very dedicated. I started with literally nothing on the first, so I don’t even have a plot idea or characters that I specifically set out to develop. I have a couple now, but I am not sure where I want them to end up. It is shaping up to be a Young Adult (ages 11-16?) novel with some paranormal elements. The main character is (again) a Korean-American girl (high school freshman) who is visited by a spirit of her ancestor and given a supernatural power. Yeah, I’ve been watching Heroes. :p Anyway, I hope to weave some of the old school Korean myths and legends and storytelling style into the ancestor’s spirit’s dialog & background. I am currently behind, but I plan to catch up, stat.

Lindsi and I had some hijinks on Halloween, involving an earthquake, a delay train, a sleepover, ice cream run, and our complete failure to give out candy to neighborhood kids.

Yesterday, we had A&B and our housemate J over for shabu shabu and clementines. We should really have people over for dinner more often, because it was such a great evening of good conversation with great friends.

Roopa is coming into town today! How exciting! And we may get to see Stephen for dinner tomorrow. Nice!

I feel like all I think about is food nowadays, with so much time off. I am going to have to make a food blog entry of all the foods I’ve cooked while on vacation.

Day 1

Honestly, I don’t think I’ll be logging my activities everyday, but heck, why the hell not try.

So, let’s see… This morning, I woke up earlier than I wanted because Mobi kept whimpering to be let out of the room. After watching some random tv, Seppo and I went to lunch with Hoa and Sean at Vik’s Chaat. Man, those lamb cholles are so damn good!

After that, we went to the Apple store so I can obsess over which Mac-produced laptop I might get through the refurb shop. Seppo figured it would be important to get my hands on them and see what the differences were.

I am a terrible decision maker as far as purchasing technology because of these two conflicting facts:

• I am really, really cheap when it comes to buying stuff for myself. I never feel right spending a bunch of money on stuff solely for me, even though I don’t mind throwing down for food or gifts for family & friends.

• I have severe tech-envy and always want the fastest, shiniest, brightest, top-of-the-line, bleeding-edge things and fully intend to keep whatever it is until they roll over and die.

Usually, because of the former fact, I rarely pull the trigger on the latter impulse.

So, I’m still mulling over things.

Seppo was/is feeling pretty sick, so I dropped him off at home and ran over to the drug store to pick up some cold meds for him. The rest of the afternoon/evening/night involved dozing on the couch, two walks with Mobi, cooking dinner, and watching a buttload of “How I Met Your Mother” Season 2 dvds.

Oh man, I almost forgot to mention that last night, Seppo and I watched the premier of The Next Great American Band. It was made of 100% awesome, braised in awesome, and finished off under a hot broiler of awesometasticness. Yeah, I know that people think I’ll watch anything on tv, especially if it’s a competition, but honestly, it was great in a way that I had not foreseen. Maybe I’ll post a video clip tomorrow.

Wow, boring entry. Everything that happened after having lunch with the always funny/awesome H/S combo was pretty boring. This is how I’ll look back on my life. 😀 Well, at least I’ll know I was being honest about my day. You couldn’t make up more boring stuff.

And it’s so perfect and exactly what I wanted for my vacation.

Job description meme

Ok, so I had a thought for a meme. Basically, I find myself completely astounded by how little I know of my close friends’ careers. I know their titles and I vaguely know what their industry does, but I have no real idea what role they play in a company and what they do on a day-to-day basis. So here, I offer to you guys a description of what I do, sans any specific details that would violate NDAs or give out corporate information in any way. I encourage you to do the same either here, or on your own blogs.

What I might do in any given project:

• Go to meetings to discuss and give my input on how features should work. For a completely generic example, if our Generic Product X needed a screen that could only show three pieces of information at any given moment, what pieces of information might be displayed for various scenarios? If the user could take two distinct actions on any given screen, what actions should they be? A lot of these talks also happen outside of meetings throughout a project.

• Go to meetings to discuss and give my input on what technologies we need to use to make those features work. Ditto on the talks happening outside of meetings.

• Research and analyze competitive products and see where they are doing things right and where we can improve. It’s always interesting to compare the difference between what a user has grown accustomed to versus how to most effectively and intuitively accomplish the same action.

• Come up with new ideas for making the product better/fixing existing problems.

• Write documentation detailing the design and technical details of how we plan to write the feature or product or fix. Keep in mind that my code might be used by thousands of concurrent users (or by one user on a system with very limited resources), so efficiency is key.

• Give input to QA so that they can figure out plans for how they are going to test the crap out of the product once the engineers are done writing it.

• Write the dang code. Test the dang code. Repeat a bajillion times. This is when things are going well.

• Rewrite or otherwise modify existing code. Read weird, outdated comments. Wonder why certain changes were made. Wonder why certain changes were not made. Wonder if changes were actually made but the comments were not updated, or vice versa. Wonder what this completely inscrutable variable is supposed to represent. Pull out hair. Test the changes. Pull out more hair. Repeat a bajillion times. Try not to go bald.

• Report back on progress for certain pre-determined milestones. Try not to fall asleep when others are reporting their progress. More importantly, try not to fall asleep when I am reporting my progress.

• In between the above “real” tasks, juggle the usual hurdles of tools I may not like, programming languages with strange limitations, platforms (Windows? mobile devices? website as viewed on a Mac with an outdated version of the Opera browser?) with other limitations, project scheduling constraints that I may not like, and most importantly, people I may not like. Luckily for me, I’ve worked with great people most of the time, so I don’t have too much reason to grouse about the last item.

What I might do on any given day in the middle of a project:

• Sit in front of my computer with the code open in an editor (can be something fancy, but it can be as simple as the Notepad program that comes on Windows).

• Read the code and figure out what is happening in the code.

• Make the changes I had planned out when I last sat there and stared at the code.

• Compile (and link) the code. For non-software engineers, some programming languages need a step to make the text you wrote down turn magically into something that does something. For instance, I write code in text, using the keyboard and using numbers and English letters. But you’ll notice on your computer that there are programs that you can just double-click and it’ll “run”. Compiling (and linking) is the step between writing text and having a program that the computer knows it can “run”. Sometimes, this step can take like an hour or two, depending on how big of a project I am working on. Sometimes, it might only take a minute. During this time, I might websurf answer emails do further research to hone my craft.

• Test the code. This means I act like a regular user of the program and see if things work the way they were planned. Sometimes, you have to do really weird things to try to replicate a problem you are trying to fix. In my past job, this sometimes involved a microwave and trying to click keys faster than one would have thought was humanly possible. For real.

• Repeat until the problem is completely solved. I joke about testing a bajillion times, but in a best case scenario, the initial investigation and planning should have gotten me 99% to a solution for 90% of the cases. The repeating comes in when there are extreme, previously unexpected scenarios. The better an engineer, the fewer the unexpected cases, because the idea is that we should be planning for all those cases, leaving very few stones unturned.

The above is, as I noted, for the “middle” of a project, after most things have been planned, major decisions have been made, and major deadlines have been agreed to. It’s also before things get closer to ready for human usage and enter the official testing and shipping phases.

If you are someone that just does this above part, I think you’d be called a programmer or software engineer. It’s the additional stuff (from the first list) when you get involved with the decisionmaking process and bring your expertise that makes you a senior software engineer or other loftier titles (I think my next title at my old job was going to be Distinguished Member of Technical Staff — hee!).

Like many other jobs, software engineers have planning meetings, internal checkpoints/milestones, research and development, and random corporate annoyances. I’ve tried to write my answers with as little jargon as possible, but reading over the bullet points show me that I’ve failed at that. Oh well. I hope some of my non-software engineering friends know a little more about what I do now.

Now, I want to know: what do you do? I really have no idea what most of you guys do on a day-to-day basis.

Last Day of Work for 2007

As of 5pm today, I am done with my employed life for the rest of 2007. Let me pause here to say, YAY! WOOHOO!!!!

Ahem. Anyway, I’m very excited for this break. As I’ve whinged and whined in the past, I haven’t had a full vacation with no work since… I think the age of 14. The longest I’ve had off since then is two weeks, once or twice to visit family and last year, for our honeymoon. I know a lot of people are in the same boat, so I have no real right to have been so dang whiny about the whole situation, but there it is. 🙂

I plan to have a whole lotta nothing planned for this break and do whatever I please, whenever I please. I intentionally don’t want to make a lot of plans and extend myself too much socially, because I just want to take it super-easy. The only things I have planned are the following:

• A trip to Tulum, Mexico! This will be my first trip to Mexico. Thanks to Max for the idea and getting us to get off our butts to sleep in thatched roof cabanas and roll out directly onto the beach every morning. I am so very looking forward to this.

• Rock Band party! Evites will be forthcoming.

• A trip to visit the little ones in GA. My sister and mom have come up with the idea of renting a little cabin in the woods for the family for a couple of days. It would be nice to go sledding and toast marshmallows in a cozy little cabin with family. Or an utter nightmare. 😉 But I’m thinking it’ll really be nice. It’ll also be quite confusing to get back from 80-something weather in Mexico and go shortly thereafter to a cabin in the snowy mountains (yes, apparently, there are snowy mountains within driving distance of Atlanta).

I start work on Monday, January 14th, 2008. It’ll be weird to be jobless for so long, but weird in a good way. 🙂 Today, I felt completely befuddled at what to do with myself at home without access to a laptop and mobile email device. I kept looking around me and feeling, well, rather incomplete. That’s embarrassing, isn’t it?

Book meme

In case you guys were wondering, this meme comes from the top 106 books that were tagged as owned-but-unread on LibraryThing.

The variation I found elsewhere when tracking down this meme said: bold what you have read, italicize your “did not finish” reads, strikethrough the ones you hated, and put asterisks next to those you read more than once. However, I will put an asterisk by the ones I currently actually own, have owned in the past, or are otherwise floating around the house but haven’t even started.

Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude – This one is particularly shameful because I got all the way to about 30 pages from the end, plus it was an amazing book. I still want to finish it.
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
* Don Quixote
* Moby Dick
* Ulysses
* Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
* War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad – At least, I think I finished it.
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
* American Gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
* Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The Historian
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of cholera
Brave new world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
* Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi Boys
* The Once and Future King
* The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons – Dan Brown sucks for characters & dialog, so even with the interesting plot, I couldn’t bear it. The aforementioned problems bordered on embarrassing. No, they were actually embarrassing. Note: my opinions are completely subjective, of course, and does not reflect a poor opinion of anyone who did like the book whatsoever.
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park – But I can’t remember what happened.
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les misérables
* The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Dune
* The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
* Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
* A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
* Cryptonomicon
* Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
* On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics – The overwhelming popularity of this book kind of angered me because it appeared to me that just because he made a lot of interesting points/connections and challenged some preexisting notions, the entire work was received as being unimpeachably well-researched. It was, at times, a piece of crap, IMO. Again, no reflection on those who loved it. I’d still recommend it, but with reservations and with a request to challenge the assumptions presented in the book itself, as the author challenges preexisting notions.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
* The Aeneid
* Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Peak cuteness?

I wonder when you cross over from being so close to someone that you can riff on inside jokes and finish each other’s sentences and it’s so awesome and fun and goofy that it makes you giggle all the time, to becoming utterly bored and annoyed by the sameness and lack of mystery of it all.

Seppo and I are still in the “omg, why are you so awesome and funny all the time” phase, and we are nearing 10 years together. I don’t say this to make anyone jealous. I know a lot of relationships over the history of the human populations must have been great for periods, but many fall apart at some point.

How do we, as a modern, proactive couple, keep ourselves from reaching that critical cliff where the familiar goes from comforting to confining? What steps must we take and what interactions must we be aware of so that we never hit that? How we we continually work to make sure our relationship is getting better and better with time?

Advice? Insight? Cynical jokes? 😀