There’s a Twitterer that I follow called @denyreligion. Most of his tweets are quite interesting, but every night my Twitter client is inundated by a string of posts of the following form:

Thanks for the RTs and discussion! @XXX, @YYY, @ZZZ….

In other words, every Twitterer who mentioned @denyreligion during the day gets acknowledged. This gets pretty boring: Twitter isn’t (shouldn’t be) a popularity contest in which people score points for being mentioned. So I responded:

@denyreligion You need a different way of handling your gratitude. A page full of these “Thanks for the RTs” just makes me want to block you

And you can guess what happened, can’t you? Sure enough, the next night I receive:

Thanks for the RTs and discussion! @XXX @YYY @geoffarnold @ZZZ…

This is just plain silly.

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From this afternoon’s MLS game between the Seattle Sounders and the Colorado Rapids:

• Injustice: giving a penalty for handball against a guy in the wall who was protecting his face from a hard-struck free kick.
• Justice: the penalty hits the woodwork.

It was an enjoyable game, which the Sounders won 3-0. The last 20 minutes were a bit flat, because the third goal knocked the fight out of Colorado. Freddie Ljungberg was the inspirational playmaker for Seattle, but the win was largely due to the collaboration between Nate Jaqua and Fredy Montero. Oh, and the attendance was a record, 32,526, beating the previous highest total by just 3. (Obviously our last-minute decision to attend was significant!)

I wanted to see at least one MLS game in Seattle, and now I have. I’ve also seen the Mariners playing baseball, but I never made it to a Seahawks game. (I don’t really enjoy American Football, anyway.) What can we look forward to in California? The Giants baseball park up in San Francisco is nice. In San Jose they have an MLS team, the Earthquakes, but they seem to be struggling rather badly. In any case, we will no longer be able to walk across the street to take in a game on a whim…

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It’s interesting what a vanity search on Google will do to a person.  In my case, I ended up stumbling across Steve and his chain-letter-like 7 Things You May (or May Not) Know About Me blog entry. Two caveats before you begin reading…
1. My entire blog is about my personal life / perceptions on things I see in life - I don’t write about work, I don’t really write about other specific people - so I’m not sure how much more interesting this entry would be.
2. I really, really, REALLY loath chain-letters and their rules, so being a total “my-pace” (Japanese colloquialism for the personality type that is a non-conformist who does things on their own schedule and in their own way to achieve their own goals) type of person, I’m going to break the rules I don’t feel like obeying.

So, without further ado…
1. Half my personality is that of a hoarder. The other half is that of a “tosser.” I tend to collect things - books, CDs, papers from grade school, them sparklies (e.g., jewelry, loose gemstones), fuurin (wind chimes), stickers, anime, manga, Japanese drama - you name it (if it’s something that I’m interested in), I collect it. I’ll spend an inordinate amount of time organizing (The Container Store has some great drawers that keep the dust off the collections), cataloging (.xls spreadsheets, dude!), and working on filling in any gaps in my collections. Then comes the fateful day when I run out of room in my room and the ax falls. It’s time to whittle down my collections. I go on this culling rampage while my inner hoarder screams in pain. Talk about conflicted.
2. I drink a lot of water. So much that my brother calls me a camel. But there is a reason… I’m prone to nosebleeds. So, if I let myself get dehydrated, the capillaries in my nose decide to punish me by splitting apart and making a mess.
3. If #2 above was too gross, I can be grosser. I tend to have a practical outlook on bodily functions and am not terribly shy about talking about them. Blame it on the “you’re going to be a doctor when you grow up” brainwashing I had since I was… umm… four? Five? Truly believing it, I did a lot of things to prepare myself for the profession. One was to be utterly pragmatic about bodily functions - especially those that little boys relish giggling about (e.g.,bloody noses and GI track functions) - and stamp out any squeamishness I might have had. I have no problem watching open heart surgeries on TV while eating dinner.
4. I can sleep anywhere. Actually, it’s more like, I can fall asleep anywhere, but I also wake up very easily. You know how I “trained” myself as a kid to deal with the personal functional aspects of being a doctor? Another one was to learn to fall asleep easily anywhere, to wake up quickly, and to function on little sleep. This was to “prepare” for the years I would spend as a sleep-deprived resident. College and E&M cured me of my pre-med plans, but my sleeping abilities stay with me to this day.
5. I don’t deal with alcohol very well. I refuse to drink liquors after my cousin’s Mai Tai made me giggly like an insipid little girl after two sips. I’m convinced that he put 98% rum and 2% juice in my cup and 2% rum and 98% juice in my mother’s cup. She drank her Mai Tai just fine. I used to be able to handle a glass of wine. But after the trip to Hawaii a couple weeks ago when I ordered a glass of wine, I’ve come to the conclusion that I can’t drink more than 75% of a glass of wine before I get dizzy. To add a little more color to what I have to do in order to drink 75% of a glass of wine and not go past the dizzy stage… I also had bread, a few pieces of sashimi from the appetizer, a plate of salad, part of the entree, and about four glasses of water to accompany the sips of wine. I finished the entree and the dessert with another two glasses of water. Then, the wine I had last Friday night totaled about five or six sips before I had to stop. Dude, talk about a waste of good wine.
6. I am a control freak but I’m also really laid-back. When it comes to me and my performance and my environment that I create for myself, I’m totally a Type-A, anal retentive, annoying brat. I hate losing control over my actions - so I’ve never gotten drunk to the point that I can’t tell myself to stop drinking, I will schedule my personal To-Do list and stick to it until the rotten thing is done, all my collections are organized and cataloged. However, when it comes to my perspective on what other people do, it pretty much boils down to “it’s their life, I don’t care what they do, unless they do something that impacts me.”
7. I call myself an incredibly lazy person. Though I suppose other people who see me working would call it hard-working. I hate untangling messes if I could have not created the mess in the first place with a bit of due diligence. I call it my “work down payment” theory. If one can afford a larger down payment in terms of work effort at the beginning of the project and if that increase in the down payment will result in a lower marginal cost of work in terms of maintenance and upgrades, then invest the time up front to save time later. For example, I am an incredibly stupid person who can’t remember what was said two minutes ago if it isn’t written down. So how can anyone expect me to remember the specifications of a product that was designed a year ago. However, to cope, I write everything down and organize all the relevant information so that if I have to recreate or edit something in the future, I know exactly how to do it. It saves me the time I would have had to spend trying to remember the specifications. The additional benefits being that if a new person needs to learn about the product, there now exists a step-by-step guide for the product, which saves me the time of trying to explain how to do things. They only need to use the guide and walk through the process. Also, if there are multiple people who have to learn the product, there is now a single source of information - a control document - that will cut down on misinformation. Untangling misinformed people because they heard it from someone who heard it from someone is really painful. I’m too lazy to deal with that. So, if I have the time, I’d rather input the work upfront to avoid future problems… see? Lazy.

And there you have it, seven things you may or may not have known about me. At this point, I’m supposed to list the rules:

* Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
* Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
* Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
* Let them know they’ve been tagged.

I’ve obeyed the first two rules, but I refuse to do the next two, sorry. The people I know fall into four camps: 1. The Already Did This Meme group; 2. The I Barely Know How to Turn On a Computer group; 3. The Attorney group; 4. The Co-Worker group.

For obvious reasons, it doesn’t make sense to tag those in group 1. For my own sanity, I refuse to tag (assuming that they’re tag-able) those in group 2. I’m not convinced my attorney friends have blogs so that kills those in group 3. And, I’m not feeling brave enough to face possible strangulation by my co-workers for passing this along (again, assuming that they have blogs).

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Waikiki - the shopping jungle in which one gets lost in all the high price-tag stores that inhabit this bit of Honolulu land.  I am a girl.  I like shopping.  But shopping for girly-girl things (except them sparkly things) can get boring after a while.  After three days of seeing store after store filled with craziness - I mean, why would Macy’s sell tennis shoes but not cotton athletic socks to go with the tennis shoes - I was ready to cry uncle.

I’m not a beach person - acne + acne medication + SPF 85 sunblock + water + sun - is just not a happy mix.  So I stay away from the beach and water sports.  Actually, the only water sports I enjoy (e.g., me, physically, participating in it and not watching it on TV) are the ones where the water is frozen over.

So what is a person in Hawaii, stuck on an island, which by definition is surrounded by water, to do?  Go HIKING!

I signed up for two nature tours with Oahu Nature Tours - a 6:00 am hike up Diamond Head Crater and a 2:00 pm Rainforest and Waterfall hike in the Koolua mountains.

Being from California and traveling to Hawaii for a wedding, the only shoes I brought with me were dress shoes and flip flops.  The nature tours weren’t anticipated activities - more an allergic reaction to the commercialization of the area I was staying.  I went to Macy’s to buy some walking shoes.  Sure, Macy’s had tennis shoes / walking shoes… but they didn’t sell athletic socks.  I walked one block over to the Foot Locker and found athletic socks galore (kind of) - but the good kind, the kind that don’t give my feet blisters, were all MEN’S L.  Umm… yeah, I can wear kiddy-sized socks, so men’s L sized socks were not going to work.

Naturally, I did the Californian thing - go hiking in flip flops!  Diamond Head in flip flops wasn’t a problem.  Waterfall hike in flip flops wasn’t a problem.  But the  waterfall hike meant muddy trails.  Muddy trails means slippery trails.  Mud = slip = Esther walks gingerly and at times splays the legs apart to walk on the “drier” banks of what would be a stream bed had water been running through it and not mud.  The step is similar to the shuffle skiers do to hike uphill in snow.

I’m actually pretty glad I wore the flip flops.  I’m not exactly the most steady person on the feet - bumbling is how my loving brother describes me - so if there’s nothing to trip over or slip on, I’m guaranteed to trip over or slip on it.  Had I worn tennis shoes, I still would be walking slowly and ski-shuffling my way down the trail. At least in flip flops I could just walk in the water as opposed to rock hopping to avoid getting the feet wet. Rock hopping would have been more dangerous for me as I probably would have slipped and fallen into the water.

The waterfall hike was gorgeous.  I loved it and the residents of that bit of the Koolua mountains loved me.  In fact, they so loved me that to this evening, a bit over four days since my hike, I’m still itching and scratching their love bites - all seventeen of them.  Those mosquitoes braved even the bug repellent that I coated all over me prior to the hike and partook of my blood.  They must have left a little extra something in their love bite because I still itch, even after slathering on maximum strength cortisone cream.

Diamond Head is spectacular at the summit.  You can see the entire southern coast of Oahu from the look out spot.  Getting to the top was pretty nifty too.  There’s the trail part, the stairmaster part, the tunnel part, the stairmaster part 2, the winding stairmaster, the low clearance that even a shorty like me had to crawl through, all to get to the lookout point at the summit.

All in all, I recommend taking a break from Waikiki and going on a nature tour to see some of the nifier parts of Oahu.

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Songbird has a few open positions for Mozilla developers. If you’re interested, or know of someone who is - please checkout the job description and apply for the job!

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Quick update as I take a break from writing my Lauder thesis: I'm graduating this May!  I'll then spend 2 months in INSEAD (Fontainebleau, France - an hour from Paris), and then off to Asia.  More details later.

Also, here's something that I did with a few buddies from our Follies show:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq8ozP0jYSM

Tout a l'heure!

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It’s been a while since we’ve featured some of the new and creative add-ons Songbird’s add-on developer community have been cranking out lately… in fact, I can’t recall if we’ve done this since post-1.0! Clearly a situation that needs to be rectified… and hence today’s post calling out some of the awesome Feathers that work in the latest 1.1.2 builds. For regular subscribers to the new add-ons RSS feed (which I highly recommend subscribing to in order to stay on top of all the new add-ons) these won’t be anything new… but for Songbird newcomers, hopefully this will turn you on to some cool new Feathers and inspire you to maybe create your own!

• YABS continues to be the most popular Feather.. easily one of the nicest of the “dark” Feathers, it’s a complete package featuring mashTape, Pure Player, and LyricMaster skinning (check out the add-on page for a complete list of all the extensions atreiu made look good with this Feather). In addition to Pure Player, he’s got Medium & Mini Player layouts incorporated too!
• Sparkle is right up there as the a long-running “dark” Feather favourite. Schwadegan just recently added LyricMaster support to this gorgeous whimsical Feather.
• NABS is the “light” Feather counterpart to YABS. Feature-for-feature, it stacks right up there with YABS… some people just prefer something lighter.
• Spotbird brings Spotify’s subtle and aerodynamic gray rubber look into Songbird. It looks particularly awesome when you have andreas.f’s accompanying Spotbird Artist Browser add-on media view installed with it.
• Aerofirebird is for the Vista users out there who want a uniform look and feel for Songbird and Firefox. It utilises Firefox’s L&F and uses native Vista borders giving you the “glass” effects.
• Pure Player is a different take on your regular Feather. It adds a new layout somewhere in between the Main Player and the Mini Player. Featuring ratings, album art, and hover-overlaid player controls, it’s a gorgeous efficient use of space. What’s particularly cool is that Feathers can supply Pure Player skins so you can, in effect, skin your own Pure Player!
• BlackfuZZ only further shows how much Songbird users like an awesome “dark” Feather. Incorporating Pure Player, Mini Player, and Medium Player skins, this Feather features contrasting light and dark themes, clean angular lines and a really slick volume bar.
• euphoria is a light Feather with some gorgeous light-reflected lime-green highlights. Sounds a little strange at first, but the colour combination looks really great. The default album artwork image looks particularly awesome in Media Flow. This features Mini Player and Pure Player layouts, and skins mashTape, Media Flow, and LyricMaster for completeness.
• Walnut2 brings in the lux with some really well done wood-grain finishing. For fans of woodies, it’s particularly nostalgic. One of the more complete Feathers, this skins mashTape, MediaFlow, SHOUTcast, LyricMaster, etc. and incorporates the usual Mini and Medium Player layouts.

That’s all for today’s post… I’ll be covering some of the wicked new extensions that you may or may not have heard of in my next post!

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Quite possibly, my favorite thing about sneezing (or hearing anyone sneeze around me) is that it's quickly followed up by a "Glass Shoe" (his way of saying Bless you) from any room in the house. He will yell it if he needs to, but damnit, he wants to bless you if you sneeze! And bless himself when he sneezes!

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I finally got a chance to catch up on the Series Finale of NBC’s ER, which I TIVOed last week.  Back in 1996, I used to watch the show religiously with my mother every Thursday night.  At the time, I had dreams of becoming a doctor one day and was very interested in medicine.  But after one too many episodes of ER, I quickly realized that medicine wasn’t in my future.

The first indication was how uncomfortable I was with the sight of blood.  While not everybody in the medical profession become surgeons or ER doctors, I quickly started to question my career dreams.  But what ultimately convinced to turn away from medicine and turn towards engineering me was the uncertainty of medicine.  I knew that I would not be able to accept the fact that certain medicines and treatments work on certain people and have no effect on others.  What I most enjoy about engineering was how deterministic it is.  5 volts in here will give you 3 volts here… without exception.

I stopped watching ER when I left for college, but I have always been impressed with the pace, depth, and emotions ER gave viewers every Thursday night.  The pace of the show has seldom been matched (maybe The West Wing).  The characters were all flawed but all very well intentioned.  But the part that I loved the most: everybody in the ER was terrified with the awesome responsibility of being a doctor.  Every character was frequently put into situations that stretched and terrified them… but they always showed real courage.  ER showed me that courage really wasn’t the absence of fear, but the ability to overcome it.  It’s an idea that I always heard from others… but saw it the very first time I watched ER.

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Since my last post, I’ve been busy with school and traveling.  I also picked up twittering, so that has reduced the need to blog.  But recently I’ve realized that my writing is not improving at the rate that I’d like.  Apparently the 140 character tweets are not condusive to helping me become a better writer :).  So I’ve made a commitment to myself to blog at least once a week from here on out about a wide variety of issues.  Ranging from married life, the economy, technology, and life in general.  Stay tuned.

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Two schoolkids flashing us some West-side love.  (Ubud, Bali, Indonesia)

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To celebrate Obama repealing Bush’s policies on federal funding for stem-cell research (beyond the few lines already existing), here is a photo of an awesome painting I saw in Bali while on vacation.  Everywhere all over the world people are excited for Obama… it’s pretty awesome.  (Ubud, Bali, Indonesia)

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upgraded to snv_109 in preparation for this weekend's datacentre move

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My talk at the Center for Science and Technology in Malaga, Spain to the members of LLSA has been posted here: http://livinglab.iavante.es/?p=32. Thanks to Eloy Rodriquez and Francisco Morero for setting up the event.

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Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read ENTIRELY
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien boring
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling x+
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee x+
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte x
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell x
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman x
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott x+
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy x
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller x+ life changing when I was 15
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare x (if we are only counting the plays. If we are counting all the sonnets, no)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier x
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger x
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell x
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald x
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams x+
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh x+
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky *
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck x
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll x
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy *
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens x
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini x
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden x
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne x
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell x
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown x
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez x
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins x
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery x+ (loved when I was 12)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood x
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding x
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan *
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert x
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen x
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley x
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck x
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov x
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold x+
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac x
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville x
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens x
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker x
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett x+ (again, as a 12 year old… this is a weird list)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens x
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro x
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White x
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle x+
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad x
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery x
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare x
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl x
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo x

Total: 49
Comments: need to go read my Russians. Interesting that many that were favs were favs as a child. The repetition of an author makes it interesting - if I didn’t like one of his (or hers), I probably didn’t try the rest.

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I will be speaking on "A New Security Pipe for the WWW", "Project SunSPOTs" and "Project Yggdrasil" at the Universidad Complutense Madrid on January 29th, 2009. Here are a few links talking about the event: http://blogs.sun.com/upm/ http://blogs.sun.com/jorgeSanchez/entry/january_29th_sunlabs_university_day1

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David's new thing is to make animal sounds. So you say "David, what does a kitty say?" And he'll say "meow!" For doggie, he'll do a very subdued "woof" but it's cute because he bobs his head a little when he does the dog sound. For cow, the most recent addition to his repertoire, he'll go "boooo!" (I can't correct him, it's too cute.) And when I say "David, what does a chicken say?" He'll say "bwah bwah bwah bwah".

So, I'm at Trader Joe's thinking about what I want to make for dinner, and I'm talking to myself loudly enough so that David can clearly see that I'm a lunatic, but I do it in such a way where it seems like I'm talking to him, too. I go on and on about the things I see in the aisle. We get to the meat section and I say to myself, "I wonder if we should have chicken tonight." David promptly goes "bwah bwah bwah bwah", and I looked at him and said in as light a tone as possible, "That's so morbid! You can't say that when they're food!" But he sure has a sense of humor.

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after 263 days of uptime, i rebooted into a newly upgraded snv_95 build.

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May 29 - Kings Mtn W OLH Loop Western Wheelers group ride (C/3/38 miles/3800ft)

May 31 - cheer Sarah and Lala on at the ICCC Dash for Cash Crit in Pleasanton, "CHARGE!!!" ; Pagemill Arastradero loop - sprint workout

June 1 - Pagemill, Arastradero, Alpine, OLH, Skyline, 84 -> San Gregorio General Store (70 miles, 4000ft)

June 3 - Fremont Freewheelers sprint/cornering/paceline workout led by Brian Meiers

June 5 - Fremont Freewheelers hills workout

June 7 - brick - bike 11 miles - run 7 miles (los altos hills) - bike 11 miles

June 8 - VG Climbing/Descending Clinic - Arastradero and W Alpine climb ~35 miles

June 9 - swim

June 10 - OLH loop - 33 miles - 2200ft

June 14 - Mt. Tam Hike

June 15 - OLH climb

June 21 - Western Wheelers Ride - 45 miles - route from Menlo Park to Vienna Woods Saratoga along Stevens Canyon Road

June 22 - Mentor VG Skills Clinic: Group Riding - Woodside

June 24 - Fremont Freewheelers sprint workout

June 25 - Woodside ride with Lala

June 26 - swim

June 28 - VG Criterium Racing Skills Clinic

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had a grueling but satisfying indoor training tonight with the velo girls team. the concept of riding through pain is still a foreign one to me, but the end goal of being faster and stronger is motivating to learn to push through and rise above the pain :P

tonight, we worked first on pedaling with just the left leg and just the right leg, to train the glut and hamstring action, muscle memory. surprisingly, it was quite challenging to pedal w/ an even stroke). 6 sets of one minute intervals, alternating each leg. next: 6 sets of 3 minute intervals. tried to think about going harder when it hurts and fight the natural reaction to lower the intensity when it gets to be really tough. tried imagining my body as part of a machine, gears, pulleys, visualizing climbing a gradual hill or accelerating to catch the cyclist in front of me. i never cease to be amazed by how much i learn from lorri and the other gals each time we train together. there's so much to know about developing cycling skills, how to train smart, set goals, improve communication with your team, strategies for racing. exciting!

menlo park grand prix is in three days :) should be awesome. tanya, sarah, lala, and lisa are racing the cat 4 womens crit. going to cheer them on and help with registration from 6:30-9:30am. it's going to be an early morning!

Schedule:

Category Start Duration Prize Value Places Reg. Fee Field Limit
Women 3 8:00am 45:00 $200 5 $30 100
Elite 4 9:00am 45:00 $200 5 $30 100
Women 4, 4 35+ 10:00am 45:00 $200/$200 5/5 $30 50
Men's 3/4 35+ 11:00am 45:00 $200 5 $30 100
Elite 5 12:00pm 45:00 T-shirts & kisses 5 $30 50
Elite 3 1:00pm 50:00 $200 5 $30 100
Men's 45+, 55+ 2:00pm 45:00 $200/$200 5/5 $30 75
Men's 1/2/3 35+ 3:00pm 50:00 $200 5 $30 100

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john got back yesterday :) he placed 5th overall in the us olympic trials for shooting (airgun). i'm so proud of him . he's got another chance to earn a spot on the olympic team in may during rapid fire trials.

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weekend recaps

last weekend:

thurs night - dinner with mel at mangarosa (brazilian italian cuisine) in north beach. we tried the ahi tuna appetizer, seafood pasta, seared red snapper, fried bananas. mojito was overly sweet. samba dancers in carnival fashion entertainment.

fri night - dinner with tammy, wendy, and steve at spicy city in fremont.

sat - brunch with xiaochien and yolanda in fremont. cooked dinner w/aunt marion - beef brisket and portabella mushrooms.

sun - velo girls outdoor training. zamora preview, 50+ mile winds, headed down to lucas valley road in san rafael. beautiful scenery. worked on climbing and descending, pace lines, group communication, race tactics.

got to know benita better after spending a couple hours driving to zamora, san rafael, and back. talked cycling, sports, parkour, movies, books, politics, sociology, nonprofits, asian community. boys :) john, my mountain man :)

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dream house sold after being listed for one week, sigh.

fri - went to see sf ballet performance of giselle w/tammy, roberta, and vyl. met up for drinks at sugar lounge. post concert, we went to get coffee/desert at essencia (peruvian cuisine). both citizen cake and absinthe were packed with post ballet/symphony crowds.

sat - brunch at the four seasons w/aunt marion and steph. sat night, john and i met up w/rob for a peter rowan concert. i have a new love for bluegrass music :D

sun - outdoor training canceled due to rain. did some indoor training instead - never sweat so much in my life - learning to really push my body, mind over pain, the power of visualization. heard the recap from the gals that raced snelling the day before. in the afternoon - piano concert at foothill college (mediocre performance - boring program of chopin and rachmaninoff pieces - composers i usually like.) yummy dinner from a&js in cupertino village.

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I was offered a position at UCLA, and I am taking it. I would have loved to see UCSF and UW first-hand, but that’s just the way things go when your specialty is not match. Even so, chances are very good I would have gone to UCLA anyway. I have been reluctant to define which program is my “first choice” (as so many have recently asked) simply because I haven’t had the chance to see many programs. But given what I now know, UCLA is a great program. Their faculty coverage is great and stable with a 3:1 student to faculty ratio, the clinic is modern and technologically up to date (with digital radiography and computers in each cube, plus a surgical microscope about to be installed), their faculty wrote the perio book that 80% of dental schools use, and the director is a level-headed, fundamentals-based periodontist who strives for clinical excellence and has vision for the program. Oh yeah, and one of the covering faculty just won the Master Clinician Award from the AAP, given to one periodontist per year. So you could say that things could be worse. There is no tuition, and stipend is a cool $20,000 per year.

Given that I will be in L.A. for the next 3 years and 9 months, I decided to go home, especially since I’m on break now. I brought my camera with me, and I spent the past couple of days surfing and photographing the coast. Here are some of my better pics (the proper gallery will be set up soon). Click for a larger image (trust me, it’s worth it).

Brown pelican in Half Moon Bay:

Pleasure Point in Santa Cruz (incidentally, the point break where I decided to become a surfer two years ago):

Shortboarder at Steamer Lane in Santa Cruz:

A bird at a beach just south of Ano Nuevo. There was a whole flock of these wading in the surf, and whenever a wave came they’d pop up and over the wave. I must have spent an hour trying to capture the right moment, and this was the closest I came. Not bad, eh?

This is that same beach:

Call me crazy, but I loved the overcast weather, the Monterey pines, the lack of crowds and the chilly wind. It just felt like home, and it was a great break from the ghastly heat that’s been afflicting most of California recently.

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For the next few days you can download Bruce Springsteen’s new single, Radio Nowhere, free off of iTunes. It’s an awesome summer top-down-driving rocker with the full E Street Band backing the Boss; too bad summer is almost over. The new album is out October 2nd, and I’m psyched. Yes, I’m easy to please.

Today’s partial UCLA interview went great; I had three of my five interviews, with the next one on Friday and the final one next Thursday. I’m optimistic. I certainly enjoyed all of the compliments on how much better I look in a suit compared to my usual Smurf scrubs. I also submitted my SF application today. I just hope I’ll have a chance to interview before I get my first offer.

I blame that program’s six different essay questions for my last-minute application. Those were some of the most difficult questions ever - imagine trying to answer “please tell us about yourself” in half a page. Now do something like that six times. Sheesh! Every other specialty has standardized applications.
Other happenings this week: reviewing 1,086 powerpoint slides for one class, and writing a 15 page business plan without any instruction. Yikes! Oh yeah, and I have a morning and afternoon patient tomorrow. I can’t decide if I’m going to party like a rock star on Friday or just go to bed early.

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From the Observer, Fatigue Cripples US Army

The anecdotal evidence on the ground confirms what others - prominent among them General Colin Powell, the former US Secretary of State - have been insisting for months now: that the US army is ‘about broken’. Only a third of the regular army’s brigades now qualify as combat-ready. Officers educated at the elite West Point academy are leaving at a rate not seen in 30 years, with the consequence that the US army has a shortfall of 3,000 commissioned officers - and the problem is expected to worsen.

The US continues to fight a war with unclear objectives, destroying not only our credibility, but debilitating the armed forces for years to come. And should we have some need of a defensive army, where would we find the resources?

And further on

War tsar’ calls for return of the draft to take the strain

America’s ‘war tsar’ has called for the nation’s political leaders to consider bringing back the draft to help a military exhausted by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a radio interview, Lieutenant General Douglas Lute said the option had always been open to boost America’s all-volunteer army by drafting in young men in the same way as happened in Vietnam. ‘I think it makes sense to consider it,’ he said. Lute was appointed ‘war tsar’ earlier this year after President Bush decided a single figure was needed to oversee the nation’s military efforts abroad.

I feel that it unfair that war sacrifice is so uneven, though I know I’ve done my part by shopping as need ;-(

If this were a war with clear and valid objectives, I would support a draft, at least intellectually. As the parent of a 17-year old, my opinions and my emotions do battle with one another.

BTW, why would a draft be male only? Aren’t women qualified?

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we had a great time in spain for bren and merce's wedding.

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pics up from our baltimore trip.

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UPDATE: 03 Sept 2007. I finally got my photos online. Click these links for my SF photos and Wedding photos. ======== Well, it’s been a while since my last posting, and so I’ll try to get a few more up in the next week! It was great to see everyone again, even if only for [...]

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So the big news is that I will be heading over to San Francisco for the first week in May. A friend, Steve, from Sun Microsystems is getting married on 05 May 2007. (Steve is one of the guys that I visited in Beijing back in October 2004… see my blog entries.) Steve had asked me [...]

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The body of James Kim was found today in the Oregon wilderness. Though I have never met him in person, I have had the opportunity to read some of his columns and also listened to one of his podcasts in the past. I was really pulling for him.

It was heroic of him to set out into the wilderness to find help for his stranded family. Who knows if they would have been discovered if they all stayed in the car. They were missing for 11 days. It is not difficult to see myself get into a difficult situation similar to what he faced. Sometimes difficult circumstances and situations quickly get out of control and you find yourself trapped. In his situation, I probably would have done exactly what he did. Hopefully I will be able to stay away from situations like that.

Condolences to his family.

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I caught “The Departed” with Mi last night at the Eastridge AMC. Really fantastic movie… possibly the best I’ve seen in the past year. I am also starting to realize that Leo DiCaprio is possibly the best actor of our generation. His performances in the “Gangs of New York”, “Catch Me If You Can”, and “The Aviator” were pretty good. But I feel in “The Departed”, he delivered his most charming and mature performance to date.  I hope he makes some noise when the Academy Awards come along… probably the first time in my life I’ve felt that way.

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I HATE LAX so much!  urgh! Slow lines, annoying security staff, no proper shopping, no proper food, terminals far away from each other, i can go on for all day.  Anyway, so I was at LAX McDonalds after battling through the 2 hour luggage bomb check line, and some announcement came in Korean “blah blah blah Kim Jung Il, Kim Jung Il”.   May be that’s Bush’s new strategy to catch the guy, page him at LAX Bradley International Terminal cuz it seems like that’s where all the Asians are!  And I wonder if Mr Kim ever made it to through security and get on the plane …..

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I’m very sad to hear this news. Boeing is stopping its Connexion service, which offers highspeed internet service (well not cable modem speed, but not it wasn’t bad either) on selected trans-continental flights (http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/2006/q3/060817a_nr.html).  I’ve used it a number of times, and it’s just really really cool to stay in touch while flying across the Pacific, not to mention it’s a great time killer.  I just cannot believe that this business didn’t survive while the stupid phone in the plane that costs 10 bucks a minute still exists!   I could just get the internet, which is 20 bucks for the entire flight, turn on my bluetooth headset, launch Skype and I can talk for no extra charge until the batteries die or until the person sitting next to me punch me in the face.  sigh……

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After spending the latter half of the evening telling myself repeatedly that I could play just one more round of the game Tradewinds instead of doing my CS assignment (due at 6 am!), I was pretty impressed that I managed to finish everything on time and still feel like I did a pretty good job without having to cram. Of course, finishing my homework on time is not an indication that I will actually arrive at class on time, but I figured being fifteen minutes late for a 2 and a half hour class wouldn’t be too bad.
So imagine my surprise, upon walking into our small seminar classroom, of having the professor announce “Tammy, you have just won an award…” (pause for dramatic effect while I wonder if I might actually be called out for being late to class) “for being the person to turn in the assignment the latest at 5:48 am.” Oops, I guess he does pay attention to our email timestamps. Thankfully, he also presented me with a free cup of coffee (which I desperately needed…yay!) so I didn’t have to spend too long debating whether I was supposed to be embarrassed or amused, and instead just very gratefully accepted the free caffeine . Apparently, my work at school has not gone unnoticed…

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So my group’s design project for our Comm class was asked to present at a poster session at the MediaX Conference at Stanford, a conference about interdisciplinary research. We created a PC tablet-like device that looks like an Etch-a-Sketch that can be used for storytelling to AIDS orphans in China. The monkey mentor character in the device tells Chinese fables and traditional folk tales in an attempt to teach children how to have a healthy attitude despite losing their parents. It ended up being well-received, which was pretty exciting, and we had a number of requests for prototypes (I see another technical nightmare looming).

Steve and Erik, you will be tickled to know that the character of the monkey was partially inspired by the Monkey King =D.

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