Friday October 15, 2004

Life is pretty busy.  Scattered highlights from the past week: 

-a sprained ankle from jujitsu (after the first 3 minutes of class),

-SF Bay cruise for Steph’s birthday (not rainy, not boring, very cool),

-an amazing all-expenses-paid computing conference in Baltimore (400 help desk managers and IT folks just like me, sorta),

-sadly, I did not get to deliver any babies while in Baltimore.  But I did sit in my hotel room and watch TV at night.  That’s okay.  One of these days.

-a side trip to see Amani in DC (and her very cute, photogenic, little brother Ascari),

-lots of Week 3 work at Meyer (in order to implement some good ideas from the conference),

-reading a textbook about the New Testament (why did I never think of this before?),

-waiting for a mentor to familiarize me with the oncology wing at Stanford Hospital so I can start going on my own,

-starting a Berlitz Spanish class (nunca hablamos ingles en la clase),

-taking delivery of the Prius after a five month wait (I got the call while in DC),

-destroying flesh-eating (well, more like rice-eating) molds at Baines,

-watching HDTV on my projector (I don’t even like TV, but it’s like you’re really there.  Really.),

-and a call from a long-lost high school friend. And another one from freshman year at Stanford. 

Photos of my trips and car at http://niftyken.stanford.edu/gallery/

Wow.  Free food: http://www.campusfood.com/

Tuesday September 28, 2004

I went to work at 1 PM yesterday (Sunday) and met with my student consultants until the last of them left around 9 PM, and then I stayed till midnight to finish up preparations for The Big Day.  Then I came to work at 7:30 this morning.  It’s past 10:30 PM right now and I’m still here.  A 15 hour shift!  Wahoo! 

Ahh, the first day of classes.  Printers silently ignored fratically-sent print jobs.  Entire operating systems declared their resistance to the human race and willed that no one should log in.  Poor freshmen ran through our building in search of classrooms that did not exist.  Real Player just would not play the instructor’s streaming media files.  Nope.  Ahh, there is nothing new under the sun.  Not even the wide-eyed new consultants who find themselves asking me about some inexplicable behavior in the cluster every five minutes.  Fun!  I love a good puzzle.  Mentally riffling through every possibility within the confines of a system, hacking together quirky workarounds to keep things moving forward, bending the rules of the game just enough to achieve the client’s goal — making it all seem easy, almost magical.  I love it!

I got to see all of the consultants who worked today.  Such a rare pleasure.  This is the beginning of a great year, even if lots of stuff didn’t work right today.  That’s just the way of change and progress, and I’m glad for all the new consultants who got to experience the chaos and the celebrations firsthand.  I think I was still feeling asleep about this year as late as last week, but now I feel wide awake with anticipation.  And I suppose I do thrive on the sense of the heroic.

Ready for tomorrow?  Oh yes!  I love Week One!  See you at 7:30 AM, James.

Thursday September 16, 2004

I had an *amazing* jujitsu night. I worked on katate hazushi ichi (you know, the first escape art you learn, the one that takes a whopping 3 seconds to learn), covered well over 50 variations of it for the next two hours, and then used the principles I learned to do three of my best straightovers EVER, even with two bad knees!! I wanted to jump up and down and celebrate, but instead I ended up just lying there a little dazed trying to let my body soak in the right “feeling” of not painfully compressing my spine, which is what usually happens when I smash my head into the mat. (You’re not supposed to do that, by the way.)  Both cool and sad at the same time: Prof told me those three were about as good of a straightover as I may ever expect to see/feel in my life.  0_o  How can I not hope to prove him wrong?

Soooo close to finishing East of Eden.  It’s sooo good, so rich.  I love Steinbeck’s little offhand and subtle comments about the characters.  It’s so raw and profoundly true.  And often disturbing to see the same deceitfulness and cruelty in my own life and personality.  Wish I had used a pencil to underline some of the best quotes.  Is this book changing my life?  Subtly, but I think so.  What should I read next?

But the past two nights I’ve been too distracted putting together IKEA furniture and learning about high-definition TV technologies as I continue to build my ghetto home theatre. I think I’m obliged to keep qualifying it as “ghetto” to distinguish it from “real” home theatres so that AV aficionados don’t get confused / upset.  I realize I am resigned to being ghetto so long as I continue to use a borrowed DLP projector and 5.1 digital surround sound system from work, a mess of audio-video and Xbox cables running all over the floor, $5 plastic IKEA stools for speaker stands, and a roughly fifteen-foot off-white and textured master bedroom wall for my projecting surface.  Did I mention the bedsheet for a curtain?  Ghetto.  (And proud of it.)