Leslie and I recently got this new printer, which kicks ass in many ways, but my most favorite has got to be the ability to print directly on special CD/DVD-R discs. Also I have found a handy repository of every imaginable cover image from CDs and movies. So now my when I make totally legal backup copies of my DVDs, instead of being cheesy-looking blanks with sharpie labels now look more like this:
Home made! I love the age of cheap media production.
Ann Arbor persisted in being entertaining all the way to the end. On the second night, we hit “Conor O’Neils” for some decent hefewiezen and trivia. Although we knocked it out of the park in the science category, we did pretty poorly on music (other than me recognizing a Portishead track) and the rest was a mixed bag. Some scurvy dogs brought laptops to the trivia challege, which if nothing else made us feel a lot less bad about losing.
The next night we played a bit of poker. It was a blast, $10 buy-in, tons of fun games. I was a big fan of Omaha in particular, maybe because the hands are so dynamic with each turn of the cards. More entertaining than non-stop, no-limit Texas hold’em, which people in Berkeley seem to like to play. Overall, I managed to get zero pictures of the trip… pretty pathetic, actually. How will I tell my grand children about that one time I went to Michigan?
And now I’m back in Berkeley, with my prelim behind me, and nothing in front but a vast expanse of semesters stretching nearly to the end of the decade that stand between me and a Ph.D. I guess you could say at this point I’m far enough in to have a clue, but not so far that I have any idea what I’ve gotten myself into. I mean, really, what could take 4-6 more years to finish?
No, really… it was the Michigan vs. Wisconsin game. And by “13 minutes” I mean “approximately for fucking ever” since football transpires in some parallel universe where time has no meaning and the network’s idea of entertaining me is a bunch of shots of people pacing around looking pissed. I would get bored and look away, only to have my attention drawn back suddenly by shouts or wails—when I did this, I would see perhaps several consecutive seconds of activity on the field, chased by more pacing. Truly a riveting game, that.
This was the prelude to Ali’s party he was throwing at his new apartment. I’m in Ann Arbor visiting, partly in celebration of being a post-prelim individual, partly because the tickets were dirt cheap. The party was fun—in poor yet excellent taste someone brought the parts for making hurricanes, which I tried. Rum… such a strange thing, foul by itself but laid low by a splash of pineapple juice. I proceeded to get Not Very Drunk while many people around me got Quite Drunk Indeed, and I discovered that in Ann Arbor, if the party is not entertaining enough, the guests will not leave. Instead, they will seek out and ingest ever increasing amounts of alchohol until the party becomes fun. You have to admire the determination, or desperation, or whatever it is.
It’s not actually cold here at all. In fact, it’s detectably warmer than in Berkeley—I constantly delight that places like Michigan exist where it is both too hot and too cold. Suckers.
I don’t know what it is about that pun… I just can’t resist it. So, Monday at 5:30 I had my big test, the Ph.D. prelim exam. In truth, it was a bit of an anti-climax. I kind of set it up to be… I had 4 mock prelims with very gracious graphics students who grilled me much more severely than my actual examiners. I scheduled the test to be in the same room that I had been practicing in, so it all felt very natural. Things kicked off with questions about a techinical paper I’d picked (this one if you must know). This was supposed to take about 10 minutes, but actually took more like 40. People had told me things like, “if they have 4 questions, and you only get to 1, you get at most 1/4 of the points,” so I was panicking a bit (on the inside). We moved along for a few questions on light an color, and that was it. This test that I’ve been getting ready for all summer, that, if failed, I would have to wait another semester to take again, that, without passing, I couldn’t move forward toward finish my Ph.D.–done. Well, that’s a relief.
So… the plan for tonight is to take all those folks who made me ready for this thing and buy them beer at a great nearby pub, Triple Rock. I should review that one soon…
So, despite my breathless promises, I’ve reached the end of another week without having taken my prelim. No, indeed, with all my frantic studying last friday Carlo came in to tell me that it had been pushed back a week. So next Tuesday it will be and perhaps a less stressed and/or more prolific Bryan you will find me then.
I posted a while ago about Kurry Klub, a great Indian place in the gourmet ghetto. I loved this place, and now it has been replaced by “Taste of the Himalayas,” and equally tasty if more northern Indian-focused restaurant. When we were there, we had several dishes, including curries, samosas, and momos. We ordered plenty of garlic naan to eat it off of. The food was delicious, and heavy. We didn’t come close to finishing off all that we ordered, and took home leftovers. Not many options here for a light meal, but if you’re down for some delicious (if not very spicy) N. Indian, check it out.
I think I was sort of a half-student last year. I commuted several times a week, I got an advisor, I took some classes, but I wasn’t really going to Berkeley. Now I am here. I go to the office every day, I have these hard classes that I’m less afraid of because I can be around for studying. I feel transformed… not back into an undergrad, but at least back into a college student. Our apartment is a beautiful refuge, so much better than the dorm. Remember dorm food? Did that actually happen? Ick. T-minus two weeks to the prelim.
Long-time overt readers will remember when I rolled my own photo gallery using ColdFusion and an Access database. A few years ago I replaced my own software with Gallery, a PHP-based photo album that was way better than anything I wrote could ever be. It had it’s faults, like storing everything in flat files and being kind of ugly, but it was very functional.
A couple of years ago they started on a rewriting of Gallery from the ground up, based on a mySQL backend for speed and all CSS’ed up for prettiness. It’s taken a while, but the code is finally ready for prime-time so I moved overt’s gallery over to the new version. Such excitement! It looks exactly the same! But it should give a lot more flexibility in the future, plus I get to stick these nifty “random photo” blocks everywhere now (see right). Let me know if something looks borked to you. I know that viewing comments on pics still kind of sucks, I’m thinking about writing something myself to fix it up.
I’ve been to Fontina twice now. Once I went just with Leslie, on a whim. The second time was with my parents and some friends on our moving day. Both were great experiences. I would describe the place as your basic slightly-nice Italian restaurant, with all the attendant dishes. Bare cloth on the tables, $15 entrees with some real effort and creativity put into them. I’ve had their bruschetta, caprese salad, chicken parmagiana, and grilled salmon. They were all interesting. The appetizers were fresh and hot (or cold, in the case of the caprese) with good quality ingredients. There was creativity in the entrees even though they are fairly conventional italian fare. I like the place but probably won’t frequent it just because I can’t spend that much on dinner often.
You thought I’d given up, didn’t you? How wrong you were.
Oscars is a place I went once last year and have gone several times since we moved to Berkeley; it’s so close. It is a straight-up burger joint. It’s kind of like a Dairy Queen but not a chain, and without the frozen treats. It’s dirty, simple, and cheap. But when what you want is a burger and fries, it really hits the spot. Not a fancy, 1/2-inch-thick, ranchero-style restaurant burger. No. What you get is a thin, flat slice of beef (or turkey or veggie) cooked in front of you with some good fries (if you like high fry to potato ratio), optionally with quite decent non-chemical lemonade. I will go back.