overt.org

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.

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Comments

Susan — 2005-08-24 06:09:13

Ah, Mr. Weldon’s chair! And what does “borked” mean?

bryan — 2005-08-24 09:02:58

http://borked.urbanup.com/

Susan — 2005-08-26 19:52:22

I love the random pictures….it’s like an unstructured walk thru your experiences and life together for the past three (four?) years.

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.

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Comments

Marc — 2005-09-06 17:07:30

My kind of place! It will be on my list when we visit next spring. But why is Berkley #13 not on your restaurant topic page? I guess turkey is the next meal we will share. Twill be here before we know it.

bryan — 2005-09-07 22:32:42

you’re so right. it should be fixed now.

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.

So, I got back about a week and a half ago from SIGGRAPH and SCA. They were both fun, it was exciting to give a talk, it hurt to crutch around downtown LA, but I survived. Since I got back Leslie and I have been very lazy… doing nothing all day, reading, playing video games, and generally being worthless. We decided to call it a vacation from activity.

But today, Leslie is a real student again… she left this morning to go her “math camp,” something that’s supposed to help get her prepared for all the statistics and such she’ll encounter in policy school. I, meanwhile, am starting to study in earnest for my prelim.

The only other thing worth mentioning is that when I visited the doctor last week, he refused to give me a walking cast but did take a week off of my cast time. So a week from today I will be off the cursed crutches nursing my wizened leg back to health.