James's Weblog

A couple of old stories that I never got around to posting:

Three years ago, a group of my friends set me up on a blind date with a girl they all knew. By coincidence, each of them knew her in unrelated ways. She was Chinese, a year younger than me, and also had gone to U.C. Berkeley as an undergraduate.

I went along with it. The date went horribly; we were both not very talkative, so the whole thing felt very awkward. I did discover, however, that she used to live in Chelmsford, Massachusetts—the same podunk town that I was from! She lived there somewhat briefly when she was little and didn’t remember much about it though, so sadly it didn’t help conversation much.

Afterward I mentioned it to my mom, who remembered that the Chinese family that used to live a few houses away from us had a daughter the same age. And sure enough, it was her! My parents even found an old photo with the two of us as little kids in it, and her parents found an old photo with me in it.

So much for fate.

Earlier this year, I asked out a Chinese girl that I had recently met playing volleyball. Remarkably she agreed to a date, and even more remarkably, on the date I found out that she too was from Chelmsford! (Her family moved there shortly after mine had moved away, so our paths had never intersected.) The date went well, but once again things inevitably ended up going badly for me anyway.

I think the Fates like taunting me.

Okay, so maybe Chelmsford isn’t quite the podunk town I think of it as. It’s reportedly the 21^st best place to live in the United States according to Money Magazine, and Wikipedia says that the middle school I attended there was the basis for Springfield Elementary in The Simpsons. Still, just meeting someone in California who has even heard of Chelmsford is pretty rare. But meeting someone who’s actually lived there? And someone Asian from a town that’s almost 95% Caucasian (the percentage was probably even higher 20 years ago)? And having it happen twice? And one of those times being a former neighbor?

After four years, I’ve finally said goodbye to my trusty but beaten-up Treo 650. I started noticing screws missing from it about a month ago, and a couple of weeks ago I lost the antenna, which fell off somewhere without my noticing.

The chipped paint and smudged icons on the buttons? That’s the result of 3½ years of sharing a pocket with my keys. That weird cloud in the center of the screen? It’s dust that seeped in and collected there. That hole in the back cover? I drilled that so that I could easily access the reset button with the stylus. (I admit that it might have contributed to the dust problem.)

I actually could have tried transferring my number to my dad’s old Treo 650, but I decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. No more reception was the push I needed to buy the new Palm Pre. (Sorry, iPhone, but I’m a (wanna-be) keyboard snob.) This also marks the end of nine years of using Palm OS.

The Palm Pre is nice. There are a few significant things and a lot of little things that I miss from the Treo 650, but having a modern web browser makes up for all the deficiencies. When I think about it, I realize that I was pretty satisfied with everything about the Treo except for its anemic and ancient browser.

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Last June while playing volleyball, I jumped to tip the ball but twisted in the air, landed badly, and felt my knee buckle with a popping sound. I was busy with work to get it examined by a doctor, and after a couple of weeks of limping around, I resumed walking around normally and seemed fine for a long while. Every so often, though, I’d hurt it again trying to play some random sport, although usually it wasn’t too bad and just left me with a limp for a week or so.

Last week I hurt it again while throwing a football, and this time I hurt it badly enough to not be able to walk, finally motivating me to get it checked out by my orthopedist. I woke up at around 6 AM for a 7 AM appointment, showed up at 6:55 AM—before the doctor’s office opened—and there already was a line. I waited there for about 90 minutes before I got time with the doctor. He then sent me down the street to get an MRI scan. Since I didn’t have an appointment there, I had to wait there for a few hours while they tried to work me into their schedule. Then back to the doctor’s office to undergo more waiting. I think I spent about six hours in waiting rooms that day—a reminder why I am usually so reluctant to go.

It turns out that—as I had long suspected—I had torn my ACL a year earlier. By now there’s nothing visible left of it (which is just as well given that completely replacing it usually works better than attempting to repair it), and in the meanwhile I’ve torn some cartilage in my medial meniscus, which is probably what caused the pain last week.

I’m having surgery tomorrow to get everything fixed.

On CableCARD impressions:

• It’s been suggested to me that CableCARDs might seem to have a high defect rate because the process self-selects defective cards. If a customer has issues with one, the cable company probably can’t tell if the card is actually faulty, so it likely throws the card back into the pool of available ones rather than returning it to the manufacturer. This means that if a cable company gives you an unboxed card, it’s probably one that someone else already returned.
• After trying a Comcast set-top box at relatives’ houses, I think as annoying as it is for the TiVo HD to list channels I don’t receive, I’m grateful that I at least can hide them manually. Comcast set-top boxes don’t offer even that. (I’m not sure if they can hide the adult programming channels from appearing in the guide either.)

On Government bureaucracy in action:

• And almost exactly a year after the last jury summons, my dad received another one. At least he didn’t receive an absentee ballot this time.

On Exit excitement:

• I’ve recently discovered that the answer is: no, I haven’t.

My mom’s cell phone rings. My mom’s upstairs, so I answer it.

A woman on the phone says, “Your ??? are ready. You can come pick them up anytime.” (She’s speaking very quickly, and she’s speaking loudly enough for there to be audio clipping. Plus, I get lousy cell phone reception at my house, so I can’t fully make out what she’s saying.)

“Uh, what?” (She’s not expecting to pick up anything.)

“??? are ready.”

“I’m sorry, could you say that again?”

“This is ??? and we’re calling about the ??? you ordered” (If someone asks you to repeat something, slow down!)

“I think you have the wrong number.”

She confidently replies, “No, I have the right number.” (A normal person would simply apologize and hang up, trusting that the called party knows what they’re talking about.)

“Exactly whom are you looking for?” (Isn’t this something she should have established from the start?)

“Martha.”

“There is no one named Martha here. Sorry, bye!”

The next day, she calls again. This time my mom answers the phone and has almost the same exact conversation. (The woman calling from the store is so loud that I can hear her over the cell phone speaker, again insisting that she has the right number.)

Even ignoring my flight cancellation fiasco, my trip to Massachusetts for Christmas/New Year’s a few weeks ago was particularly memorable, being full of a number of firsts for me:

• It was the first time that I’ve played Guitar Hero.
• It was the first time that I’ve used a Wii Fit.
• It was the first time that I’ve played Brain Age. (I apparently impressed my cousins by getting “jet speed” on the basic arithmetic tests. I stink at Sudoku though, but I already knew that.)
• It was the first time that I’ve tried Comcast video-on-demand. I’m thoroughly unimpressed by the selection. (It was particularly disappointing considering that Comcast misleadingly includes its video-on-demand selection in its advertised comparisons against DirecTV.) I like Netflix Instant Watch on TiVo better.
• It was the first time that I’ve rented a car.
• It was the first time that I’ve driven in Boston. I hate rotaries.
• It was the first time that I’ve (sort of) driven on snow. Okay, it was mostly limited to driveways, but that was still plenty scary for me. The streets I drove on were plowed.
• It was the first (and hopefully the last) time that I’ve been in a car while it rolled over. (No, this isn’t related to any of the previous items. I wasn’t brave/crazy enough to drive while it was snowing. And yes, everyone thankfully escaped injury.)

We originally had a flight at 9:55 PM yesterday night from San Jose to Boston with a connection in New York. JetBlue calls us on Sunday afternoon to tell us that our flight is cancelled and to reschedule through their website. By the time I get home to get online, the next available flight it offers me is four days later, arriving the day after Christmas. Lame. The website also offers to give me a refund, which is useless with such short notice.

I call JetBlue to see if there’s anything else they can do (maybe put me directly on another airline?), but they say no and that the Thursday flight is my only choice. Sigh. (Can’t some of the passengers on the next day’s flight be bumped off to make room for us? Is it really more fair to screw some passengers a lot rather than screwing a lot of passengers some? Debatable, I suppose.)

After I hang up and start looking at other airlines’ offerings, I realize that I have two other major airports at our disposal: Oakland and San Francisco. The JetBlue web page for rescheduling cancelled flights doesn’t allow departing from a different airport, but attempting to a book a flight direct from Oakland to Boston shows that there are available seats on a 9:15 PM flight that night. I call JetBlue back, ask if I can be put on that flight, they confirm that will work and reschedule me, noting that the flight is delayed to 11:05 PM.

After I hang up, I decide to check the flight status to see if it’s delayed any further. JetBlue’s website says that it too is cancelled. What? Did the agent just reschedule me to a cancelled flight? The website still lets me book seats on that flight. I check again an hour later, and now it says that the estimated departure time is now 10:45 PM but still claims that it’s cancelled. (Why is the departure time changing to a supposedly cancelled flight?) I call JetBlue back and ask. One agent says that the flight does appear to be cancelled. Another agent says that it isn’t. I tell each of them about the conflicting information, they put me on hold while they double-check, but I get disconnected before either can get back to me.

I check with Oakland Airport. Surely they’re the final authority on knowing which flights are actually departing from their runways. Their website says that the flight is not cancelled and that it’s scheduled to depart at 11:30 PM; I call them to confirm, and the lady there says 11:05 PM. (She also explains that the flight was cancelled earlier that day but that they decided to go through with it after all.) Even when we show up at the airport, the departure time at the gate says 11:10 PM, but the airport’s computer screens say 11:20 PM. Wacky.

Our flight actually did manage to leave (at around 11:30 PM), and we did manage to arrive. Phew! It could have been a lot worse (and was for a lot of other people).

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is easily my favorite CS book (although I confess it is the only one I’ve actually read). Its exercises happen to utilize characters named with double entendres: Alyssa P. Hacker (“a Lisp hacker”), Cy D. Fect (“side effect”), and Louis Reasoner (“loose reasoner”).

When I was a teaching assistant at Berkeley for its SICP-based course, I created my own character: Oski M. Wizard (“a Scheme wizard”). The name was perfect since “Oski” is the name of U.C. Berkeley’s mascot, and SICP is also known as “the wizard book” due to its cover graphic.

Sadly, he never got much exposure. I tried to get Professor Fateman to use him on one of his exams, but I think he didn’t understand the joke. (I probably should have pitched it to Professor Harvey instead.) At least I managed to use him in some practice exercises I gave to my section (which is more than I can say for another character I made, Sue D’Coda).

Poor Oski. And he so desperately wanted to impress Alyssa.

My crotch is really sore, but I think I can sort of ride a bicycle now. I have a hard time getting starting going uphill, though.

I think the bicycle Mitchell lent to me is too big.

Things to do before I turn 30:

1. Learn how to ride a bicycle.