adrian is rad

You don’t look classy and timeless in that black trench coat and fedora. You look ridiculous.

I’ll give you a guess as to what was one of the things I missed most when I was in Taiwan last year.

It’s pumpkin pie. When I realized that spending Thanksgiving there meant no pumpkin pie, I was practically distraught. I tried to have some around Christmas when I was back in American but the circumstances didn’t work out. And pumpkin pie just doesn’t work outside of the time frame of October-December.

So when I was at Mission Pie, one of the overpriced but very good places in the area, the other day with a friend and they had pumpkin pie, I was pretty happy. The two-years-in-coming slice was delicious.

That’s the NFL distribution match for this Sunday’s late (4:15pm EST) FOX game (courtesy of the506.com). Blue is Seattle @ San Francisco and red is NY Giants @ Pittsburgh.

Regardless of other affiliations, I think we can all safely say that we all want to be in red states for this one.

There were at least two noteworthy David Lawrences: David H. Lawrence, the English writer of Sons and Lovers among other things–probably the better known of the two–and David L. Lawrence, the Pennsylvania Governor and Pittsburgh Mayor, for whom the convention center is named. Next time you’ll know that D.L. didn’t write Sons and Lovers and D.H. didn’t govern Pittsburgh.

I spent lunch time walking around Chinatown yesterday. It was really reminiscent of a Taipei in some ways, hills and many white tourists notwithstanding.

Signs in Chinese and badly mangled English. Going into stores with foods only labeled in Chinese. Not knowing quite how much language you share with someone working in a store. Extremely slow old people on the sidewalks…

It’s strange what what one misses about a place.

Yesterday morning I saw my breathe for the first time in many months. It’s getting brisker here, but it’s overall still pretty warm compared to the eastern provinces.

The sunrise that morning, seen from the 2nd deck of Caltrain, starting around Millbrae or San Mateo and developing through Redwood City was one of the most beautiful I’ve seen[2]. The photo on my camera phone failed to capture it. It was red-orange on a light blue sky with plenty of wispy clouds, the kind that tend to spread the colors of a sunrise/set so nicely.

[1] Not really cold by any real standards. Just chillier than a few weeks ago.

[2] Just because waking up before dawn is generally the domain of crazy people, I usually avoid it. As such, I haven’t actually seen that many sunrises.

This web game where you have to do various geometric things by eye–finding midpoints of lines, convergence of three lines, sides of a parallelogram–is pretty addicting, at least for me. My natural talents apparently, lie more in bisecting angles than finding the center point between three edges of a triangle.

I laughed a lot at the first of these videos and then the follow-up videos wer pretty good, too.

Wow. What a world we live in.

HD TV commercials are funny: they try to demonstrate that their picture is better despite the fact that you’re (probably[1]) viewing it on a TV that can’t actually show any of the advantages.

[1] And if you’re viewing it on a TV that can show the advertised TV’s great picture, then their TV isn’t better than yours.

my first earthquake. It was tiny. In the five years since I’ve moved to California, I’ve had an amazing ability to be out of town for earthquakes, at least 3 of the noticeable sort. Additionally, there was another small one a month or so back where I was at a ballgame and people were stomping their feel and otherwise shaking the stands anyway, so it was not noticeable.

Nilla Wafers shouldn’t come in a “Stay Fresh” bag within the box, they should come in a “Go Stale Quicker Please” bag. They’re best that way.