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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.

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Comments

clare — 2005-05-21 03:23:12

“that the neighbors are browsing”

riiiiiight.

if i had a microwave right now, i’d make some bagel bites.

bryan — 2005-05-21 07:52:25

well, see, when I’m browsing porn I don’t use a wireless connection. so i couldn’t have been mine.

leslie — 2005-05-22 09:17:47

Mmmm, bagel bites.

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.

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.

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?

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Comments

Jeff — 2005-05-01 10:32:35

You need more classics. Your collection is way too biased towards recent stuff. Get a list of academy award winners or that film institute list of the top 100 moveis that came out during the millenium rollover or the IMBD top 50. I bet you’d find some gems.

Susan — 2005-05-03 17:44:53

Gone with the Wind, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, The Muppet Movie, Adventures in Babysitting (ask Leslie about this one), Dances with Wolves, Young Frankenstein, E.T.

bryan — 2005-05-03 22:53:04

Yes, perfect! Thank you both.

george — 2005-05-08 15:55:09

city of lost children, desperado, spy kids, kung fu hustle, war games, ferris bueler’s day off, alien, aliens, predator, aliens versus predator, terminator 2, original bbc hitchhiker’s guide, original bbc underworld (by neil gaiman), the crow!!!?!, at least one or two seasons of macguyver and brisco county junior, firefly (i hear it’s good), twin peaks, 007 Goldeneye (whatever other bond films that didn’t suck), batman, batman returns, quigley downunder, the good the bad and the ugly, 24 (i hear it’s like crack), uhf, lost highway, castaway, Tamala2010: A Punk Cat in Space, election, creul intentions && dangerous liasons, hero, mad max 2 (roadwarrior),

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.