Danny ChaiI read Internet Newsgroups pretty regularly, and it’s interesting how certain groups have people that kind of own the group. In rec.music.christian, I’d say it’s pretty clear that Jerry B. Ray, from Georgia Tech, dominates the newsgroup. He’s clearly the most visible and the most dominant in postings. In alt.fan.tv.robotech it’s this guy Peter Walker III from Rice. Totally dominates the group.
Paul Lee, I found out from my sister that Sueann and Gloria are visiting Houston this break. Ack! If you’re not going to Mexico, think about coming. I need the balance.
There’s this story that came to mind I thought I’d share. The summer before I came to Stanford I worked at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Anyway, a couple of friends of mine also worked there with me that summer. At any rate, working in the lab next to me was this guy from Stanford, Eric Chen. He figured out I was going to Stanford because I was wearing a Stanford Prospective Freshman T-Shirt one day. I was just doing the laundry and this shirt reminded me of this incident. Anyway, we met and talked a bit. He also met my friend Bobby who worked across the hall from us.
So one day after work, me, Bobby, and the other friend (who had not met Eric) were walking down the hall, leaving, and we walked past Eric. But instead of saying hello, we just kind of smiled at each other. You know how you do that with people sometimes? So me and Bob smiled and kind of nodded and he smiled back. Now if you know Eric, you know he has a really big smile. Anyway, the third guy, Peter, hadn’t met Eric and he didn’t know we met him either. So he just saw this guy smiling really big. So after we walked by, he said to me and Bob, “There goes one happy person.” It was hilarious.
What a week! But I finally finished CS108. It is amazing how much we actually got done and running in the last 24 hours. One of the most productive 24 hours I’ve ever seen. And I think if we had just 5 more hours, we could have finished cutting and pasting shapes, an intro screen, and maybe more.
Anyway, it made me happy. One thing that made me particularly happy is that I got speech to work. So if you type in text, the program can speak it using a speech synthesizer built in to the Mac. The pronunciation isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty funny. So after I finished my program, being a dork, I spent the evening typing in phrases I found funny or witty, which, given my state of sleep deprivation, was just about anything. Some sample sentences: “I love Andy Hsiao. He is hot hot hot! I long for his nipples.” Actually, there’s more but probably shouldn’t be published on the Web. But it’s pretty cool. Stop by Serra 117 and I’ll show it off for you sometime.
Tonight I stayed up to finish my CS221 problem set which turned out to be not hard at all and only took around 4 hours. But I started at 2 and took a lot of time messing around. This is probably a record for me, but all week, I did not sleep earlier than 6:00 AM. Impressive, Starfox, no?
I don’t know if you’re into college football but I was looking at the official names of the college bowls and it’s seriously ludicrous. You would not believe it. Back when I was younger, it was just Sugar Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, Orange Bowl, Rose Bowl, etc. Now almost every single bowl has a sponsor name attached to it (which is sometimes hilarious) and some bowl names are totally ludicrous. Look at the bowls this year. I swear I am not making any of them up.
Las Vegas Bowl (OK, this isn’t too bad a name, though not too catchy
Jeep Aloha (the beginning of corporate names in the bowls)
Motor City (is this new? I never heard of it before)
McDonald’s Heritage (another recent bowl)
Insight.com (the most ludicrous bowl name ever)
Poulan/Weed Eater Independence (ha!)
Sports Humanitarian (??)
Carquest
Plymouth Holiday
Builders Square Alamo
Norwest Sun
St. Jude Liberty
Tostitos Florida
Outback
Toyota Gator
CompUSA Florida Citrus
Southwestern Bell Cotton
Rose
Nokia Sugar
Chick-Fil-A Peach
FedEx Orange