A few weeks ago, Jeff and I did a 14-mile training run. A couple of days later, I noticed that there was some pain in the bottom of my right foot. After it persisted for a few days, I started to wonder, but I kept running. 10 miles on the weekend, less during the week, then Bay to Breakers. Finally, when it hadn’t gone away in over two weeks, I did some searching and talking and it seems I had developed “plantarfaciitis” due to overuse of the tendon between my heel and my toes. Intent on not injuring myself for the marathon, I took two weeks off running and did other stuff for cardio. Last Saturday I tried easing back in with a three-mile run, but the pain came back almost immediately. Sigh. So, since it seems like if you aggravate this injury it can take years to recover from, I’ve decided to shelf the marathon. It sucks. I really, really, wanted to do this, and I have already run so much to prepare, but it’s not worth hurting myself to do. So, maybe in 6 months or a year I’ll try running a bit more and see whether it has cleared up. grumble.
Author: bryan
hi ho hi ho
Back at work! Back at Apple! What a strange trip. I’m actually sharing Doug’s office for the summer; it seemed like a better choice than sharing a cube with other interns (ick). The first few days were filled with awkward moments where I met people who all remembered me quitting and we probably very confused by me showing up again. In all, though, I suppose that’s better than building up a group of work friends and resources from scratch.
Sharing an office with Doug has been great so far… he was nice enough to clear out a whole corner for me, and Rick hooked me up with a computer and after battling the account gods, I’m pretty much back to the state I was in after working about 2 months from the first time I started. We even bought a cheap stereo for the office and can now rock out to something more substantial than the tinny built-in speakers in Doug’s G5.
The first week was almost entirely absorbed by the process of differentiating my ass and a hole in the ground, as is expected. In all, I think the summer will be a blast. I regret somewhat not just taking the summer off to study for prelims and lounge, but I know I would probably just get bored and frustrated doing that, and this way I make some money while I’m at it.
On an unrelated note, I moved all my IRA money over from Fidelity to Etrade, mostly to take advantage of the very low expense ratios and low minimum investment in their index funds. This in itself is not interesting, but what was interesting was when I logged in at the beginning of last week to discover that someone had thoughtfully deposited $28,000 in cash into my account. I resist the “withdraw by check” button on the webpage and discovered that someone had just written the wrong account number in somewhere. Sigh. Just reinforces this feeling I have that money is a farce.
passive conduits
I was driving home today on the freeway, noticing all the people around me talking on their cell phones. I wondered how many conversations were being beamed through my skull at any given moment–10? 100? Just streaming through, little packets of people’s lives, diced up into electronic squirming coils, passing through my cortex, my medulla oblongata, my heart, my liver. And me, blissfully unaware, listening to the sound of the road and a trillion molecules of air getting shoved aside by a thousand cars. And as I sit here typing this? How many? How many wifi packets of porn sites that the neighbors are browsing at this moment? Where precisely through me will the new york times front page headline burrow? I can almost feel the sensation of being saturated by information, constantly awash in it, even when I sleep. We are all being slowly microwaved.
berkeley food #11: Viengvilay Thai
2505 Hearst Ave
Berkeley, CA 94709
510.540.9791
This is a little in-and-out quick Thai place near, but not quite in the “food court,” a group of about 7 restaurants on Hearst east of Euclid. I ate here a lot while I was working on SIGGRAPH, so I think it deserves mention. The best thing about the place is their yellow curry, which is delicious and creamy while not being too heavy. I like it especially with chicken, though they don’t always restrain themselves to using the best parts. Once you leave the realm of coconut milk, though, the place has less to offer. It’s cheap, it’s close to Soda, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to visit. Plus, in Berkeley, you can usually throw a rock from one Thai restaurant to the next, so your choices aren’t limited.
berkeley, year one: check
Well, I’m sitting here in my office at Berkeley waiting to give a presentation of my class project for the only real class I had this semester. This year I’ve managed to show up, weasel my way into being a graphics student, land an advisor, and help write two papers, one of which will be in SIGGRAPH. I also somehow managed to land an NSF fellowship, taking care of money for the next three years. In total I rode BART to and from Berkeley at least 160 times and spent at least $1200 on BART tickets to do so. Will I appreciate the 10-minute walk from our fabulous Berkeley apartment? Oh yes, I will.
This weekend is Bay to Breakers, which I will be taking this year at a more leisurely pace than last in order to better enjoy the chichanery that abounds there. And then, quite suddenly, on Monday I will be back at Apple, working away on some dark and magical task that you will no doubt here about via Apple’s PR team in good time.
In all, life is beautiful.
great movies for a library?
So, we’ve had a netflix subscription for a little over a year now, and we’ve really build quite a little library up (you can browse it here). I know there are tons of great movies we haven’t gotten yet. You know, real staples. For me it was stuff like The Princess Bride, Dune, Blade Runner, Amadeus. I’m running out of ideas now after cycling through about 300 discs. What are the classic movies you’d want in any library?
SCA: check
Friday was the deadline for SCA, so this last week and a half or so has been busy again. Not quite like that time running up to SIGGRAPH, but still busy enough to keep me from doing basically anything with my time other than eating, sleeping, commuting, exercising, and working. I have arrived at this beautiful day and now my free time stretches out in front of me like a vast untapped well of joy.
I’m typing this from Tiger, the new version of OS X, which has even more absurd eye-candy than its predecessors. I don’t see how it will be possible to take other user interfaces seriously at this point.
Speaking of Apple, I just signed my offer letter to go back and work there for the summer. I’m starting frighteningly soon–May 16–and it’s making me realize that this first year of grad school is basically over. It will be good to get the extra money, though I’m not so worried now that I’ve got NSF to lean on. It should be fun too, since Doug will be there and I won’t have to spend a lot of time getting to know new people and processes. Also kind of weird to be in that role again.
Leslie is something like 35 teaching days away from the end of TFA. I guess that’s out of 360 total teaching days… less than 10% left, but it seems like even less than that, really. The little paper chain that I made her has gotten so short. We’re looking around at apartments in Berkeley, and it seems like our budget will be just fine for getting a place right where we want to be. We’ll probably go up next Sunday to see a bunch of places. Even though we don’t actually want to move until mid-July, now seems to be the time to hunt so we’ll probably just have to take the hit of the extra month or two of rent.
Tomorrow: 14 miles. We’ll see.
miles, knees, NSF
Sunday was my 12-mile run. It was hard… significantly harder than the 10-mile runs I’d done the two weeks before. I might not have eaten enough the night before, or slept enough, who knows? But my knees are starting to worry me a little bit. It’s not that they hurt, though they do a little right after the runs. It’s that they sort of feel “fragile,” like when I’m sitting down or standing up, I favor them and don’t want to put weight on them. It’s not a good feeling. I also noticed at the climbing gym yesterday that my usual extreme antics of bending my knees to my will didn’t come so easily. I’m not sure exactly what to make of it, whether my knees are adjusting to new demands still (I’ve been seriously training only a little more than a month now) or if they just don’t like it. I’ve decided to skip my run today to see if the sensations subside.
On Friday I got some surprising good news: I won an NSF graduate research fellowship. This is a pretty fancy fellowship, and one that I’ve applied for three times now. The first time, I worked my ass off preparing. I went to an NSF application workshop, I had my essays read by former NSF reviewers, I polished them over and over, I warned my letter writers months in advace, etc. The net result the first year was an honorable mention, which is respectable but doesn’t come with any money. When I was doing my second round of grad school apps in Fall ’04, I figured I should apply again. I revised the essays, but didn’t change much, and had all the same letters. Not even a mention that year. They say that it gets harder each year because you are held to a different standard–first you’re an undergrad, then you’ve graduated so another year of experience is considered–so it was mostly out of futility that I applied last Fall. Carlo wrote me a new letter, and after looking at my comment sheets from last year I totally scrapped my essays and started over again. This time no one read them but Leslie, and they were very short–all less than a page–and written with the singular goal that they would be interesting enough to entice the reviewer to finish them. I guess either the system rewards persistence or short essays or new letters did the trick because I got it this time.
This will really make things easier for the next few years. I won’t have to hunt each semester for a new source of funding, whether that’s as a TA or a research stipend or whatever, and by the time it’s over I should only have a year or two left (man, this degree takes a while). My one concern is that I’d like to get experience TA’ing multiple times, and I know that Jeff has had some difficulty becoming a TA with his fellowship (which is running out this spring), since you can’t work as a TA for free. Hopefully I’ll be able to “turn off” the fellowship for a semester here and there when I want to TA.
Anyway. Life is good.
siggraph news
Well, it seems like the paper I helped out on for this year’s SIGGRAPH has officially been accepted. It was one of only two papers from Berkeley, which is kind of disappointing, since there were so many other great papers submitted. But this is the problem with having just one conference.
Work continues on our SCA paper that’s a follow-up on the paper we sent to SIGGRAPH. We were also invited to send a clip from our SIGGRAPH paper to be included in the electronic theater there this summer, which is flattering but will be a bit more work since we’ll need to render it all in HD (1920×1080).
Hence I think I’m going to be pretty busy the next couple of weeks, and then there are only a couple of more left before finals and the end of my first year as a grad student. Damn.
10: easier than 9
So… I just ran 10 miles. Another week, another first. The thing was, 10 was much easier than 9 last week. It must have been the shock last week that made it so hard to finish. The pace was slow again, as I plan to keep it: 10 miles, 100 minutes. The first few miles I watched the US lose a world cup qualifying match to Mexico, played in Mexico city. It was strangely exhilirating. I felt kind of like I was running along with them. Now as everyone knows I’m not the biggest fan of sports, but I found myself, totally alone in the room, muttering at the players on the screen. “Get that ball out of there!” “No! No! No!” “That’s right, that’s the way we do it.” All of this kind of stuff. Pretty crazy. The game ended about 3.5 miles into the run, and I didn’t feel myself tiring at all. I took this as a good sign, and found Rounders on another channel. It had just started, so I figured I was set. At 5 miles I ate a cereal bar (I hadn’t thought to bring something to eat last week). At 6.67 I ate an energy bar, and started to feel a little tired. I took a couple of minutes walk between 7 and 8, then finished without any real trials.
I’ll admit I was kind of scared after last week–26.2 miles?–but I feel much better now. I’m creeping up on half of the distance, and I haven’t broken yet. Still… I’ve only done two long runs, and I’ve got 17 more plus the marathon. I’m really curious to see if I can pull this off.