Here's the deal: I'm supposed to be in Costa Rica, but I'm in Berkeley instead. Our flight out of oakland to phoenix was delayed to the point that, if we took the flight, we would miss our flight out of phoenix to costa rica. The nice lady at America West's ticketing counter booked us on a Taca airline flight out of San Francisco to Costa Rica. It was a red-eye.

So they put us on a shuttle to SFO, and we got there at around 3:00. The Taca desk doesn't open untill about 9:00 pm. We spent the afternoon in the airport reading Harry Potter.

Once the Taca desk opened, the agent told us there was a problem. The America West agent had booked us on the 1:00 AM for *Saturday* morning. I don't know how she managed to get a confirmation number on a flight that had left 11 hours previous.

Upon hearing this, we troop over to the America West desk (in a whole different terminal) just to find it completely desserted.

At this point it's about 9:30 and Nikki starts trying to get a hold of someone at America West on the phone. After telling the above story no fewer than three times--and it's a confusing story, so it takes a while to tell--the AW people tell us to go home and try again tomorrow.

So 16 hours later, here we are, back in Berkeley, booked on the exact same flights for Sunday.

PS The moral of the story is: don't fly america west.

I'm leaving for Costa Rica tomorrow morning. I'm very excited. The forecast looks a little dreary, but that's what I get for going to the tropics in the rainy season. I'll be sure to post some pictures when I get back. Don't go crazy while I'm gone!

So my boss had me helping him with a presentation he was working on. He wanted to use a frame from a Pogo cartoon (by Walt Kelly, for those who care) in one of his slides. He has some trouble interfacing with the intertron, so he asked me to help him find it. Apparently he had found what he was looking for by using google image search with the term pogo. I did exactly that, and to my horror, the first hit was [nsfw]this picture . That's right. My boss had essentially forced me to look at boobies while at work. I guess my job isn't too bad after all.

An article (by a findlaw writer) on CNN about the legal precedent that may apply to the Karl Rove identity leak case.

If manhattan can do it, so can you!

Ok, ok. I know. You're sick of me posting stuff from Penny Arcade. Well, I simply had to share with you a quote from today's newspost. For the most part, said post is similar to (albeit self-consciously) the impotent whining of a kid who can't play with his toy. The last bit, however, manages to turn into an acute sort of distopian consumerist manifesto:

"We purport to be angry, but it is largely an ethereal anger, suitable for forums on the Intertron. There is no connection between my willingness to purchase shoddy products and the continued production of said products. At any rate, there is no connection that I am able to perceive."

If you haven't heard of Project Gutenberg, I sugest you check it out. It's a huge resource of both free and public domain books, digitized for your electronic consumption. It's also a great resource for when you want to know how many times Shakespeare uses the word 'tup' in Othello, for instance. Just search over the whole text.

Anyway, it seems that in order to speed the digitizing of these books, someone scans all the pages and uploads them. The pages are then OCRed, but they still need to be checked. This is where the Distributed Proofreading system comes in. You go and get a page and check it for errors. Once all the pages are checked, it becomes an official e-book. Hooray!

I'm working on an online GRE prep course. It gives a question, then provides feedback. I got a tough one right, and here's what it said to me: "Wow! The light of a thousand suns is no brighter than you." Kind of effusive, if you ask me. Anyway, the prep is free to UC Berkeley people (and maybe others). Check it out.

My life is full of boxes. Some of the boxes contain memories. Mostly, they contain old phone bills and other junk.

How fast can you clickred? My best time in two tries is 74 seconds. It is supposed to be a demonstration that twitch gamers are better at tracking multiple objects than non-gamers.

I don't remember if I ever posted this, so here you go: Penny Arcade remixed by japanese school children.

You're in Cuba and you want to get to the US. How would you do it? These folks took a taxi cab.

Pretty Pictures make me happy.

Today's Penny Arcade post spoke to me in a way things on the Itarwebs rarely do. The sentence about his refrigerator magnets? Brilliant. The entire post drips with expression. Well, the first sentence in the last paragraph drips with ichor from the typographic morass from which it was dredged. Some random punctuation got stuck in there on the way up. Overall, though, I feel that grammar euphoria is an oft-overlooked topic and deserves more such rhapsodies.

Also, my dream last night was a survival-horror combination of World of Warcraft meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Thrilling.

Things that suck:

• My cold-that-won't-go-away is back with a vengeance.
• My car with only 40k miles on the odometer failed its smog check this morning.
• The hard-drive on my computer at work died and I'm still trying to get the data back.
• On top of my general laziness, my cold plus an unusually busy schedule mean my apartment is an absolute sty. gross.

Things that rock:

• I'm learning how to use Linux as a desktop. Yay Knoppix!
• I'm going to Costa Rica in July.
• There's a long weekend coming up.
• WoW is a lot of fun.

My lack of updates has been fuelled by the failure of my commenting system and my bussiness with the Berkeley Opera. Here's a review of our opening night performance. The reviewer is a UC Berkeley alum, and as such was over-kind to the UC Alumni Choir (of which I am a member).

Instead of sets and such, Berkeley Opera hired some artist to put together some video that was projected on screens on the stage. The reviewer expressed pretty well how I felt about the results:

"One set of [projected] images was hackneyed. Macbeth becomes a tyrant and so we saw the familiar faces of twentieth century tyrants, including – surprise – Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld. Does the audience need this kind of prompting? Leave the simplistic parallels and polemics to Bill O’Reilly and radio talk shows."

How to write a lab notebook
Disclaimer: This link is not intended to be entertaining or even interesting to anyone not looking to learn the basics of keeping a lab notebook.

I should have read about quick-release bicycle wheels.

Be advised that blind people can still hear.

What do you call it? I call it "the city". It seems the hippest kids call it "tha 'Sco". The (only very slightly) less hip call it "Frisco". Some feel this isn't the right thing to do. And among those, at least one owns a laundromat.