adrian is rad

Check out Cracked’s list of ‘that guys’. It’s a pretty good list; I recognized all of them but only knew the name of one of them.

In my line of business, it’s not unusual to get a couple packages from Asian (mostly Taiwan, China) a week. Sometimes the packing material is pretty cool. Some parts were packaged in this box last week.

I like the font (the ‘E’ in erasing and red-dotted ‘i’ in particular) and general graphic design. Also, having all that Chinese script just makes it that much cooler. It’s like someone’s bringing the traveling to me.

I went for a 3/4 mile swim in Aquatic Park today and I was reminded of some necessities for cold open-water swimming:

• silicone ear plugs: keeping cold water out of your ears helps keep you warm
• barracuda hot head neoprene swim cap: keeping your head warm helps keep you warm
• bodyglide: sounds dirty, but actually it’s just to stop chaffing. I use it in my arm pits mainly. (especially useful for salt-water swims)
• a swim suit: really, I recommend a swim suit for all swimming, just for modesty’s sake. I mean, really, you don’t want people to see everything.

Oh, and one more thing. So this is actually “5 things…”

• goggles: these things keep water out of your eyes

One optional other recommendation if you aren’t doing so well in the far sighted department:

• corrective lens googles: if you’re sighting off a far-off object, being able to see it helps. These goggles are relatively cheap and pretty comfortable.

I was talking to my friend Jesse on the phone. He was about to head to a bbq with some mutual friends.

me: Say hi to people for me.
Jesse: I probably won’t actually do that but I’ll say I will because it will make you feel better.
me: …

Thanks, pal.

I tried my hand at high speed photography courtesy of quake electronics

It started 10:30 last Sunday morning. I was still in bed and my other friend Dave gave me a call. The Maker Fair was great, he said, and that it’d be worth a trip to San Mateo to see it, so I headed out and met him there a little while later.

I got there and he was right. It was pretty awesome. I saw a bunch of really cool things, like what is below. I also got to hang out with the awesome folks at instructables, try my hand at welding (with the tech shop people), try high speed photography (see above), see some incredible and cool robots, talk to some interesting folks and eat a funnel cake. The presenters ranged from middle school kids who made lego robots to octogenarians with hand made, very precise engines that ran. All in all, if you have any geek in you, I’d recommend going to the Maker Fair next time.

Tesla coil!

A really cool cart with all mechanical, hand-cranked, hand-made mechanisms/ toys/ displays:

A really cool stylized sculpture with moving engine parts in the head:

more after the jump:
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Imposter Caught: High school graduate pretends to be a Stanford student, even living in the dorms, buying textbooks and ‘studying’ for exams

I can’t believe I was ever associated with that weird place….

Quite possibly the worst yogurt flavor ever is Yoplait Light Orange Creme. I don’t want that flavor in my yogurt! (I think I must have grabbed it thinking it was the much better apricot mango flavor.) It’s worse than the odd apple turnover flavor.

It’s mixtape time!

You can download the zip file with the following:
1. mp3s of the songs
2. liner notes (pdf)
3. playlist files (iTunes txt file and an m3u file)

(for the iTunes file, simply import all the songs to your library and then go to file->import and then select the song list (the txt file). you should now have the 2007may playlist in your iTunes with all the songs in the correct order).

If you want to read the liner notes before downloading the whole thing, they’re here. This one includes a lot of great indie pop/ rock plus some great soul and oldies songs. New Laura Veirs, some French Quarter, Bishop Allen, Elliott Smith.

Adrian’s May 2007 mix tape (zupload link with zip file, I’m trying this because hosting the zip was a significant bandwidth drain. let me know your thoughts on it; maybe I’ll switch to something else next month if that doesn’t work well.)

As always this’ll be up for a limited time (~1 week), so grab it now.

If you like the artists or songs, I suggest supporting them by buying their music, going to a show, buying merchandise from them or at least telling other people about them.

I have been swimming a mile at a time these days, approximately 1600m, or for ease, 1600 yards (yes, I know they’re not the same). I count in 50 m/ yard increments, 1 length if the pool is set up in the 50m direction, 1 lap if it’s set up in the 25 yard direction, so that ends up being 32 increments.

I often get distracted by the thoughts of the day—one of the best parts of swimming is the time to think—and some days, the hardest part of the swim is keeping track where I am. (Other days, it’s pacing, speed or endurance.)

The three points (or ranges) where I often lose track of where I am:

• 3-6
• 10-13
• 18-21

Do you like the part where I find the most mundane details of my life and blog about them?

“This is my favorite” is a new series in which I show you my favorite things. I am going to start with kitchen items.

This is my favorite fork. It gives me joy when it’s in the drawer when I go to get a fork. It has clean and attractive lines.

The spork resemblance has been noted, but I didn’t actually see it until someone pointed it out.

It is a marked “US” “United Silver Co.” and “Stainless Japan”.

My other friend Dave and I were out getting some snacks when we saw “X-13D” Doritos and we had to get them. The bag says “All American Classic”. What could go wrong.

We got back and cracked them open

and gave them a try.

Note: backup Fritos

Man, these things are weird.

“What did I just put in my mouth?”

Dave said they tasted like a McDonalds Cheeseburger but a little spicier. After trying one myself, I think I have to agree. It has that bad mustard-dill-fake onion-maybe-even-ketchup taste. Very very strange. I stopped at just one on these chips.

Old Joy (wikipedia, trailer) is a minimalist story of two old friends who go camping for a weekend.

Kurt (Oldham’s character) is a free-floating and free-thinking friend who comes back into town and calls up Mark (Daniel London’s character) asking if he wants to check out some hot springs in the woods outside of town. Mark “asks” his pregnant wife(?)/ girlfriend (?) if he can go and then sets off. Kurt is that unreliable asshole friend that you have, the one that you love but you don’t count on for anything. Kurt gets them lost on the way to hot springs and delays the whole plan.

Friends change; that’s what this movie’s about. Mark is on the verge of fatherhood while Kurt has gone, it seems, from one hot spring and wild forest adventure to another. At the same time, it sort of shows you why those friends are still important even if the two don’t have that much in common.

Yo La Tengo’s soundtrack is great and works really well in the film. I must say, though, it didn’t quite floor me like their soundtrack to Junebug.

[1] “subtle” in critic-speak means the same thing as boring, but in a positive sense.

Tomorrow is Bike To Work day in the Bay Area, but everyone can take part.

I encourage you to take part. I’d also encourage you to do something extra: bike from work too.

[Yeah, I know, that’s the same joke I made last year.]

A much funnier potential alternative to microdermabrasion: microdermlaceration[1].

“Oww! Why is my face covered in tiny little cuts! Seriously, how is that going help anything? Seriously!”

[1] types of wounds

I lived in Germany during the summer of 2002 and I traveled nearly every weekend. I arrived in Germany May 28 and left August 23. Sometimes I use this blog to put things down that are at the edge of my reach memory-wise, so I can make a record of them. I actually have all of this written down in a notebook, but I can’t find it.

• May 31- June2: Bremen, to visit Colin[1]
• June 7-9: Düsseldorf to visit my Oma[2], Frankfurt to visit Sam Breuning[3]
• June 14-16: nothing
• June 21-23: Solingen, Köln to visit the cousins Füser[4]
• June 28-30: München[5, 7], Bayrischer Alpen[6] for MIT-Germany/ MIT Club of Germany meet up
• July 5-7: Vienne, Strasbourg France for the Vienne Jazz Festival[8]
• July 12-14: Berlin, for LoveParade 2002 and visit with Justus[9]
• July 20-22: Hamburg[10], Lübeck[11] w/ Christian
• July 26-28: Karlsruhe for the “Savage Seven” ultimate frisbee tournament as a part of die Sieben Schwaben[12]
• August 2-4: Romantic/ Clock Road, Rottweil; Stein am Rhein, Switzerland; Rottenburg ob der Tauber w/ Meredith Gerber[13]
• August 9-12: Pittsburgh, USA for Colin and Heather’s wedding. Surprise![14]
• August 16-18: Köln (to see Bugge Wesseltof) and Frankfurt, w/ Sam Breuning[15]

Footnotes:

1. Bremen smells like hops when the wind is the right direction because of Becks. The Schnoor area was neat, with its small and odd houses.
2. My Oma didn’t realize I was related to her for the first hour of my visit; the Alzheimers had started to take its toll. This ended up being the last time I saw her. I regret not having stayed with her for the whole weekend, but at that point I thought I was going to visit again that summer.
3. Sam was a cool British kid also with a German father; he’d been on the Cambridge-MIT exchange. We ended up hanging out a number of weekends that summer. I’ve since lost touch with him.
4. My dad’s cousin (my “Tante”/ “aunt”), her husband and kids (my “cousins”) were all gathered at their palatial family estate in Solingen for a sculpture showing of a local artist set up in their gardens. At one point we all, including the artist, were sitting under some trees eating a snack and they asked me if I liked one of the statues near us. I said, in stilted German, that I did (it was actually one of the few I did). It came out wrong and they made fun. I said “echt!” in vain. At another point this weekend, another cousin-by-marriage of my dad’s who was also visiting announced, after having talked to me for five minutes that I spoke “perfekt Deutsch.” Right…
5. We all met at a Biergarten, all the current students and the MIT Club of Germany members. I was stuck at the Club table for most of the night, which was extremely awkward. At some point I excused myself and snuck over the student table. Seeings as it was social interaction with people I didn’t know well, it was still awkward, but not nearly as much.
6. We went hiking in the Alps and stayed in a rustic ski cabin that one MIT Club member had access to. Sam and I got a ride down with a guy who spoke with a typical German accent except, because he’d spent multiple years as a ski bum in the US, mixed it with ski bum slang and inflection all the time. At the cabin, I learned I was ace at splitting logs with an ax, usually splitting decent sized logs in one swing. During one of our day hikes we stopped at an inn, where a 10 year old kid was drinking a 1 litre “maß” glass of beer.
7. It was the day of the final when we got back to Munich and I had the surreal experience of watching Germany play (and lose) in a World Cup final with 10,000 Germans in a public square where they’d set up screens. Turkey won the consolation match so there was some celebrating. (Note: Turkish is the largest minority in Germany by a factor of 4, at least at the time.)
8. Vienne has a Roman amphitheatre with gorgeous acoustics. Sam knew the mayor of Vienne so we got VIP passes into the events, including into a VIP area the first night where we passed the London Times jazz critic. Vienne was about 450 miles from Stuttgart, a good 7 hours, which we drove non-stop on Friday afternoon, on half a tank of diesel in a pretty amazing VW Passat TDI. We still missed most of the first act. Also, French radio sucks. I bought a CD-tape adapter after this road trip.
9. The LoveParade is a parade along a mile-long route on which 40 heavy duty trucks with world-class DJs and sound systems drive for an entire afternoon. Estimates for my year were 500,000 in attendance. Oh and there were a lot of topless girls there.
10. My (second) cousin Christian lived in Hamburg at the time. He’d stayed with us in America in the early 90s and he was out to repay the favor by showing me a good time. We went out with some friends. On the way there, he’d talked to them and said he was bringing his cousin (”eine Cousine from mir”) with him. We got there and the friend said “this is your hair dresser (Friseur)??” See, they might sound alike on the phone; yes that doesn’t work in English and I don’t care. This was the first night that I drank more than one beer in a night, in fact, probably quadrupling my total beer consumption ever in just that night. The goal was to stay up all night and go to the Fischmarkt when it opened at 6am, but it ended with me falling asleep in a bar at 4:30am, having had multiple beers (mostly Heinikens while watching a crappy, but, let’s be honest, fun American cover band) and a good quantity of vodka. Incidentally, trying to explain complicated concepts in German wasn’t easy, let alone to a group of strangers in a loud bar while intoxicated. And, Malta, I can’t say your name correctly sober either; but you can’t say “squirrel” to save your life, so there.
11. The bells of the main church had fallen and melted from the bombings in WWII. They’d be left as a beautiful and poignant reminder. Lübeck in general is a wonderful small town.
12. “Savage seven” means no subs (the seven you have to start is all you have). Having gotten roped into this at the last minute, I played seven games of no-subs ultimate frisbee in two days. I can still remember the intense pain, mostly in my calves that I felt for the rest of the week. Walking on flat ground and up stairs, my right calf hurt intensely; my left calf hurt similarly walking down stairs. I couldn’t, and didn’t, win. Of course there were 6 flights of stairs between my office and the cafeteria/ train level at work.
13. This was a fun little road trip with another MIT-Germany person; Meredith was in Munich for the summer. We went to some classic historic German places. I also made my only trip to a Switzerland, to the town of Stein am Rhein, which was noted by the “strict” border crossing. “Passports? No, we don’t need to see those. In fact, you don’t even have to come to a full stop. Just roll on through!”
14. After the rehearsal dinner, I had some friends over, got tipsy on Mike’s Hard Lemonades and had to search for the right words to use in English. That I was thinking partly in German was a big step for me and I noted my progress.
15. Bugge Wesseltof had impressed Sam and I with his electro jazz stylings in Vienne. Plus we liked his awesome name, so we drove like maniacs (once again) to get to Köln by show time, only to be disappointed by his collaborative work with a female jazz singer.

I’ve more or less halted training for the triathlon and haven’t done anything serious for the last week and a half. My knee is injured, so I’ve been taking it easy, taking naproxen or ibuprofen, icing it, heating it, etc.

Things I have done in that time: swam twice (1.0 miles, 0.75 miles), aqua-jogged* twice (10 minutes, 20 minutes), bike a small amount (3.3 miles, 4.7 miles, plus practicing track stands for 20 minutes) and walked quite a bit.

It’s starting to feel better, so I’m going to be slowly testing it out: a flat and easy 10-15 mile bike ride tomorrow and if that works, ~1-2 miles on the track (soft surface) on Thursday. Both will be with my new knee brace.

I’m a classic over-doer, but I’ve learned my lesson for this month at least, so, don’t worry, I’m not going to do too much.

*Aqua-jogging is possibly even more boring and stupid than regular jogging. But it’s low-impact.

I’m pretty proud of myself: I cleaned my desk yesterday…for the first time since I moved to my current house (August 2004).

I’m pretty happy about this. Probably a little too happy. It’s the little things…

And it wasn’t even on my to-do list!

Yeah, I’m about a weird as the following posts make me seem, but not as ornery.

Hi?

“Now your gums are bleeding a little bit because you don’t floss enough.”

I’d beg to differ. I believe my gums are bleeding because you just spent the last half hour jabbing them with a crude shive.

Seriously, why do we take this from dentists? This is the 21st century and they’re sitting there with midieval steel tools ready to poke my teeth and gums. What’s next? Blood letting? I could probably have my gallbladder removed less invasively than having my teeth cleaned.

I’ve been tired before. Back when I was at that place, I had weeks on end that were a complete haze, working on problem sets, projects, soldering until 4am then waking up at 7am so I could be at the machine shop at 7:45am when it opened so I could beat the rush.

There were times I was tired enough that I didn’t notice I was moving the tool into a piece of brass on the lathe axially instead of radially and I cut the piece in two and had to beg for replacement stock.

There were times when I was sitting in class and—dozing off in class was quite normal for me, even the over-caffeinated me—that I just woke up and the class was over. There was no head drooping and then waking with a nod repeatedly or really any idea or memory that I was dozing off. I was sitting there, taking notes and then, suddenly, I was waking up and the class was over.

I used to consider the amount of sleep I got last night a good night’s sleep. You got it pretty easy, boy.

playlist

mynewspecialfunmp3ofmyshowthatyoucanlistento (mp3)

Dave and Tina were in town yesterday, so I headed up to SF to hang out with them in the afternoon and evening.

We walked from Ghirardelli Sq, down Columbus to Giordano Brothers, a restaurant that serves “Pittsburgh-style” (aka Primanti’s) sandwiches. I love this place. They do this style of sandwiches well and it always helps/ calms my nostalgia needs. There’s also some good people watching in the area.

We then walked down Columbus (past the transamerica building) and then down to the Embarcadero. From there we made our way down past all the piers (picking up a much needed Slurpee near the end) before going to Musee Mechanique. It’s on Pier 45, right at the end of all those piers by Fishermen’s Wharf.

Musee Mechanique is a collection of coin-operated devices: penny arcade games, photo booths, flip-card movie machines (“Mutoscopes”), fortune tellers, moving dioramas and music boxes and other music machines. The collection has items from the late 1800s up until probably the 1990s, but most of them probably come from the first half of the 20th century.

It’s an amazing collection. More importantly, it’s a lot of a fun. I’m a big mechanical geek so the intricate mechanical ones are really cool to me. It’s pretty cheap: free admission and the games are 25 or 50 cents each for the most part, so for $5 or $10 you can play a lot of them.

An ancient and gorgeous sounding disc-based music box

After that we headed over the Mission to eat at Walzwerk, the always-delicious East German restaurant. Good food, good beer, not too pretentious. Winners!

Mel’s Bowl rounded out the night. It was really quiet, save a bunch of Warriors fans in the bar. We were one of two groups bowling. There was this really cute old couple next to us. The wife was asleep while he bowled. He was slower but was obviously good in his day. He had a lot of finesse still and was pretty good (he could easily beat me). I was cheering him on the whole time.

I bowled pretty badly with a 113 and 115, but I still beat out Dave to be the absolute champion.

more photos after the jump (way below)

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Required valet service for one of its dorms.

I could say many things, but I will only say one: I wouldn’t be surprised if I push my far-in-the-future kids to go some college where it’d be silly to have a car at all, and definitely away from one that has a valet service.

I’m pretty sure my fastest growing finger nails are as follows:

1. right ring finger
2. left ring finger
3. left index finger

At least going by the ones that are always the longest when I need to cut my nails.

Extreme ironing competition. It is what it sounds like. Some great ones in there.

Palo Alto has a gas-powered leaf blower ban. Okay, seems a little extreme, but you know, you want to do well for the environment, right?

Well twice in the past couple months, I’ve seen this: an electric leaf blower plugged into a gas powered generator.

For those of you who aren’t engineers or this isn’t obvious to: an electric leaf blower plugged into a gas powered generator is necessarily less efficient than a gas powered leaf blow. It’s quieter, though, while it’s killing the environment more so at least we got that!

This week’s triathlon training:

• Running: 6.7 miles
• Cycling: 18 miles
• Swimming: 2 miles
• Bricks: none

I had some knee pain this week. I think I’m going to take it easy, especially on the running for the the first half of the next week. If I try any, it’ll probably be on a softer surface like the track.

Here’s the playlist. Here’s the mp3 NEWSPECIALFUN.

Percentage of times I eat yogurt that I spill some on myself: approximately 50%. It’s pretty bad.