LL in Seattle

On Monday work sent me (and note that me is Laura Lee, not Clay) to Seattle to help train some other designers in our new corporate brand. It was a fun to play “important traveling-for-work-girl”, and even though I was only there for one night I did manage to see a couple of interesting Seattle sights while out and about.

I landed around lunch time and went straight to the EY office, which is right downtown. And even though I was technically supposed to be working I spent a lot of the afternoon gawking out the window at their amazing views. From the EY office on the 35th floor you could see the huge football stadium and also sweeping views of the “sound” as they call that big river/ocean thing. Very pretty.

After work I went to check in at the W hotel, which I must say was pretty swank. The lobby was like a night club, with fancy blue lighting, thump thump music, etc. I didn’t take any photos so that I could maintain my “I’m important and stay here all of the time” disguise, although I’m pretty sure that the girl in the elevator was on to me when I couldn’t get the buttons to work. Elevators can be tricky! Anyway, my room was great and had a nice view of the downtown buildings. And it turns out it was a magic window because when I woke up the next morning there was a new view…this time a huge mountain. Apparently it is Mt. Rainier, a gigantic mountain that is always there but you can only see it some of the time because of the clouds and rain.

So Tuesday morning after I woke up early and admired my new mountain view I headed over to the fish market. I by-passed 8 Starbucks along the way so that I could have the pleasure of buying my mocha frappachino at THE original Starbucks. Where, btw, the girl behind the counter was from Texas and Willie music was playing. Not your typical Seattle grunge, but it was Willie so who’s complaining.

Here I am enjoying my authentic Starbucks, admiring the view of the Puget Sound.

Back at the EY office, our trainings went really well, and then after work I had about an hour to kill before heading for the airport. After taking an informal poll on what to do I decided to check out the library, which was close by and apparently very cool. So off I went, but when I got there I realized that I didn’t really know what I was looking for, other than just general library “coolness”. I decided to give the elevator a try (this one was slightly more cooperative than the one at the Dubya). When I got into the elevator I hit the 4th floor button, which was labeled the "Red Floor". So here is a photo:

Ahhh...they meant a red Floor, not just a red floor. Fun.

This last photo is just a random window display that I thought was cool. And I'm including it because it's probably the only one of my photos that you couldn't find a better version of it on Wikipedia..

So that's Seattle for you!

Jim destroys nature, but we saw a Bassett hound

(BTW, here is a link to all the pictures from the this trip)

Sunday LL and I went hiking in Mt. Tamalpais Park with our friends Jim and Kim. The park is north of SF (just across the GG Bridge) between Hwy 1 and the coast, and it's really pretty, as you'll see in just a sec. We of course had a wonderful time and saw a lot of cool things and got plenty of exercise, etc., but we also learned a couple things. First, LL and I found out that, when it comes to hiking in mountains, we are approximately elderly. Second, we learned that, no matter how elderly you feel, sometimes boys want to climb to the absolute top of the mountain (even at their own pathetic geriatric peril, as the case may be).

We met Jim and Kim at the Safeway at 9:15 (LL and I walked to the Safeway because we weren't satisfied knowing that we were only going to hike 7-8 miles in the mountains). We bought sandwiches, some trail mix and a bag of cheddar popcorn (guess which item LL picked out...actually I can't make fun because the cheddar popcorn was awesome...and we didn't even open the trail mix). Jim drove, following the instructions of his Magellan GPS gizmo. I'm really jealous of it.

OK, so...the hike. Like I said, it's about 7-8 miles. You start out at about 1500 ft elevation near some ranger station and follow "steep ravine" trail down to the beach (that being about 0 ft. elevation...approximately). That's the half-way point where you eat your sandwiches and cheddar popcorn. Then you walk back to where you started on a different trail. Anyone see a problem here? No? Let's recap:

Trip Start: 1500 ft.
Lunch: 0 ft.
Car: Still at 1500 ft.

That's right, my fellow sluggards, we were a quarter mile below the car with no escalator in sight. Bummer. But the surprising thing isn't that we (it turns out) could have made that hike, no sweat. The shocker is that we decided to take a side trip along the way (spurred by a depleting ratio of oxygen to testosterone) that included a really steep climb up to 2100 ft. (the top of the mountain). It was a bit embarrassing for me, actually. Jim and Kim jaunted up to the top like a couple of pixies (no offense, guys) while I had to take breaks every 20 ft in order to keep my calves from staging a sit-in. Absolutely humiliating. But, on the bright side, we did actually make it to the top, and consequently, we didn't feel at all bad about eating pasta for the next 4 days.

So here are a few pics from the hike...


This first one is a (once) living branch that Jim snapped like Hulkamania (eh...making up for the pixie reference). He was trying to set the camera on a nearby rock in order to take a group photo, and this branch was just a little bit in the way. LL was about to say that the branch might do a nice job framing the photo...alas.

There's Jim, Kim and LL. The trails on this trip were really well-maintained. I guess you sort of expect that on trails that get a lot of traffic (and this one has 2.1 million granola munchers within a 20 miles radius), but still it was nice.

These are just some trees in a little grove close to the beach. I liked them.

This is the last mile or so heading down to the beach from the mountains. You can see the trail disappear over the last remaining hills on its way to the ocean. Notice the waves crashing on Stinson Beach.

And here is our best dog-sighting of the day. It's a Bassett (obviously) and I happened to catch her tail in mid wag, which makes LL happy (sometimes it's the little things). By the way, we also watched a retriever repeatedly fetch a tennis ball (and have an absolute blast doing it). But while I was eating my lunch, I got a single sand grit on my sandwich and it really ruined what would have been a great bite, and that made me think that it must really suck to not have hands and to have to pick up a sandy tennis ball in your mouth. It's kind of been driving me nuts ever since.

Here are the four of us right after we ate (the car, not pictured, is far, far away).

In this photo, I am standing on a trail that leads off to the right (where the car is...just a couple miles away, but otherwise at about the same elevation). But straight ahead is the infamous El Muerto** peak, which we decided to tackle because we thought the view would be incredible. Jim and Kim are about flutter up to the top. I would not be able to overtake LL, who didn't exactly sprint. Love us.

So, here is the view. What do you think? Do you think that maybe the camera isn't working properly or something like that? No. The fog was thick. But instead of climbing back down, we noticed that you could go a little higher. Unlike many poor decisions we've made, that one turned out pretty good...

Isn't it cool? We are basically looking south toward SF (so to the right is the ocean and to the left is Ohio...you know, way to the left). We actually must have climbed up through the clouds, and the view is just awesome. To the right (couldn't really take a good picture of it because it was too bright) was a sea of cloud...like looking out over a calm, white ocean. (the white ocean being what we were down in the middle of in the previous picture).


And here's the payoff shot. Again, this is looking south with SF behind us. You can see the bay and even some sailboats out there. We spent a while up here looking around. I really enjoyed it all in the end, even though getting out of bed monday morning was a little brutal, honestly. But we did have a great time and I'm sure it'll make us skinny.


** OK, OK...so the peak is not called "El Muerto." It's actually called "Hang Glider Site #1." Big deal.

Check out this guy's bio

I get several emails each week about various speakers who are coming to campus (topics ranging from climate change to Prof. Oldnsmart's favorite circuits, ...all kinds of things). Without exception these emails have two parts: 1) a summary of what the speaker will talk about (sort of an advertisement...they try to make it sound important), and 2) a short bio of the speaker (a chance for the speaker to brag about him/herself in the 3rd person).

For the most part, these bios are all the same..."Mr. Daigle received the BS degree in Computer Engineering from Texas A&M University blah blah blah..." But this guy below, whose name I changed since I don't really have permission from him to publish this (though he hardly sounds like the kind of person that would care), has made a complete mockery of the bio in the best way possible. I'm definitely going to his talk! Anyway, here's the bio half of the email...

About the speaker:

Tick Nennick has the usual degrees from typical universities
and has held an uninspiring assortment of run-of-the-mill jobs.
For example, he has been a fry cook, Air Force pilot, janitor,
university professor, dishwasher, design engineer, truck driver,
naval officer, oil field worker, and corporate executive. He even
helped start a few companies, but was soon forced out.

However, despite an appalling lack of knowledge about
programmable logic and electronics in general, he was once chief
scientist at Altera, a leading maker of programmable logic
devices. Through what could only have been a monumental
bureaucratic foul-up, he was also once a Research Staff Member at
IBM's prestigious Watson Research Center. Nennick has put
considerable effort into finding something he could do well. No
luck so far.

He started his career as a working engineer (nerd), but moved to
management when he found watching people work was easier than
working. He moved to a university when he found talking about
work was even easier than watching it. He has finally reached the
pinnacle of his career in a position where he doesn't even have
to talk about work. He is a technology analyst for Gilder
Publishing.

Awesome.

Ponchatoula candy goes big time

Yesterday was Valentine's Day. LL and I agreed to take a minimalist approach to the whole thing this year; mostly because we have two mondo weddings coming up (LL's sister and her old roommate -- who currently boasts a 2:1 margin over me in terms of LL-cohabitation time). Since neither of them would oblige us and have their weddings in SF, we are left single-handedly giving the airline industry its first profitable quarter since 1916. Actually, we've been getting really good deals on the flights because LL watches airfares like a hawk (If she and I ever separately made identical vacation plans, she would manage to save an easy 30% compared to me).

But anyway, we figured we didn't need to go overboard on Valentine's Day, so we just went to a low-key dinner in Palo Alto. It also sneaked up on me a bit this year. For some reason, I kept thinking it was still a week away in the fuzzy future somewhere, which is surprising because I remembered that the carton of milk we have in the fridge was going bad on the 14th, and I knew that was yesterday, yet nothing triggered my Val-alarm (please, no making fun of my priorities). Finally yesterday when I did my first Google search of the day, I saw the Valentine's motif and thought, "Ooooohhh, the milk's going bad on Valentine's Day."

After dinner we wanted to get a box of chocolate and some wine at the drug store near the restaurant (seemed like a good idea at the time). At first we wanted Russell Stovers because we'd been making fun of their commercials in which they make a big point about looking for the R.S. box with the distinctive bow...like they don't think guys are smart enough to remember the brand name (Personally, I would have benefited more had they said Valentines day is Thursday repeatedly). We quickly found the R.S. boxes (with requisite bow), and I was all set to buy that when LL saw another box shaped like a heart...

LL: "Maybe we should get this tacky box shaped like a heart."
Clay: "It doesn't have a bow on it."
LL: "It's made by Elmers. Don't they make glue?"
Clay: "Elmers!? Elmers is made in Ponchatoula! Are you sure it says Elmers?"
LL: "Yes"
Clay: (takes the Elmers box and reads the back) "Holy crap. It says 'made in Ponchatoula, LA.' We have to get this one."
LL: "Are you sure? It doesn't have a bow..."


So here's what we got home with. The front of the box says, "For a special person." Awesome. You can laugh (we did), but in some sense, I want to applaud this effort because they avoided the overspecification pitfall of greeting cards (e.g. when you find the "perfect" birthday card for your cousin, except that on the inside it says "Congratulations, Grandson!" This drives me nuts for two reasons: First, I don't know why on earth they want to limit their potential purchasers to people with a grandson who deserves congratulating. Second, even if it said "Happy Birthday, Cousin," and thus was precisely correct, I'd still be aggravated because that's what I was going to write, and now I have to think of something different like "You sure are a swell guy" or whatever).


And here's proof that Elmers is indeed from Ponchatoula. I also covered up all the Nutrition Facts to protect the innocence of those mentioned in this post.

Stanford Photoshoot

Yesterday LL and I drove up to Stanford because it was a beautiful day. So nice in fact that we decided we would throw a blanket down on one of the big lawns and lounge in the sun to read. It's totally one of those romantic images you have about college life...that along with picturing yourself at a baronial desk surrounded by tall shelves stacked with leather-bound books, lost in thought about Dickens and Poe while watching a single spec of dust, just gently stirred from a century of stillness, drift lazily in a shaft of warm sunlight flooding in from a skylight in the high ceiling above (that was supposed to sound cheesy because it never happens...As a general estimate, a laptop + Wikipedia/Google has about 1000x more useful information than any campus library. Colleges don't have a monopoly on information, they just provide the service of giving you grades, which makes you actually study**. And when people have their romantic thoughts about college, they never think about grades. Ever. Actually, that's probably best).

Anyway while we were there I wanted to first take a few pictures in my frequent haunts...it just seems like some day I'll be happy to have a few shots of my life as a grad student.


This first one is of me in the cube. Usually I have a laptop open where all those cords are, but I didn't feel like I needed to be that authentic. LL stood on a chair to take this.

This is me acting like I'm walking to class. Confession: I never walk this way when going to class. In the background is Hoover (the president, not the FBI guy) tower. He (Hoover) was in Stanford's first graduating class.


This is memorial church in the center of campus. All faiths have access to the church, but it also has a giant picture of Jesus on it. There are approximately 1.87 million pictures of this church in existence, but I decided to take my own. It doesn't hurt anything to take one more.

When we finally got out to our reading spot (there was a hamburger pit stop along the way) it was getting to be late afternoon, which means we didn't get to stay much more than an hour. But I can only lay on the ground for a limited amount of time anyway before I get really uncomfortable, so that was fine. I think that this picture of LL is really, really cute. She thinks her hair looks bad, but I never notice that.
In this last one I'm holding the camera out for a self portrait. I don't remember why we were laughing, but we look happy! The happiness might be a result of wearing short-sleeves and sitting in the sun in early February. When we were getting burgers, I saw on the TV that temperatures in the midwest were at -40 (with windchill). Bummer.

** Note that I think universities serve lots of valuable purposes and I do not actually want it to sound like I'm reducing them to learning cops. Especially when you get into areas of specialty, many universities in fact DO have access to information that you can't get anywhere else.

Furniture repair!

Sundays are tough at the Menlo Park outpost of the Daigle/Box family. The psychology of it all is as follows: LL takes Sundays pretty badly because it means the weekend is almost over. So she regrets how, yet again, we failed to do anything fun or get any skinnier. For example, last night (which was a Saturday), she wanted to go see a movie, but instead we stayed home and ordered Chinese food, which accomplished neither the fun nor skinny parts of her goals. It is also on Sundays that LL notices the apartment isn't tidy and sometimes that can compound the feelings of not getting stuff done.

I on the other hand, don't mind Sundays that much. My low point actually comes on Friday when, yet again, I feel like I didn't make very much progress that week on school or research or whatever else. So I'm the opposite...to me Mondays have so much promise; a whole week to get a lot done. But before you know it, it's Friday, and I've just wasted another good week. So then I want to make up for that by getting work done over the weekend. The consequence for LL is that I won't plan anything that will get in the way of that. Like a MOVIE for example...it's like a 3-4 hour time investment once you add in driving, parking, etc.! I don't mean that when you look back at a given weekend, there wasn't time to see a movie (or 10), I just mean that I never want to allocate that time a priori. Effectively, I make sure that we waste the whole weekend in 15-minute increments.

Anyway, last weekend, about 2 hours before the Superbowl, I decided to tackle a small project that I have been worrying about ever since we moved out here (you can't study during the Superbowl anyway, and I decided to see if I could get this project done between plays and during timeouts...I did!). The project is this: our bed frame is made of wood and it's an antique. Over the last few decades, some of the wood has started to split, and that was exacerbated when we got married and I tripled the amount of weight it has to hold ("tripled" is a high approximation, but it is polite to say that your wife only weighs half what you do). I decided that I would fix the bed. Right then.

LL really got pretty down about this particular project. I think to her, a Sunday could only get worse by throwing in a trip to Home Depot. I thought she might enjoy this rare instance of weekend accomplishment, but that was a "stupid boy thing" to think. Anyway, she toughed it out and actually she really like the Superbowl. She was happy for "little Eli." So all in all, we ended up in good spirits, even though things were in severe doubt when we were picking out wood screws on aisle 6.

Well, here are the results. The original cracks are highlighted in yellow. They are hard to see because I used a clamp to press the wood back together and a bunch of glue to strengthen it. Finally, the metal braces are strips of aluminum that I wrapped around each end and screwed in. It looks a bit dodgy here, but the repairs were done in a way that there really is minimal visible impact on the bed when it's all put together.

Toothpaste results and Hitchcock

First, the new Colgate toothpaste seems to be working out nicely. The taste and texture are fine...just as long as it's not too gooey and doesn't have some horrible flavor like Orange. I also like the little flip top that keeps me from having to fumble with a screw-on lid early in the morning (when coordination and patience are...low). Way to go, Bryan.

So, I had this idea that I would document my day at school, but it turned out to be hard to take even remotely interesting pictures. That's because I really just sit in my cube most of the day and draw on my whiteboard. I thought about scattering some books on my desk, opening my notebook to an impressive page with lots of equations and arrows, putting something interesting on my computer screen, and basically staging a workspace photo that makes it look like I live in a vortex of high-tech invention (you know, like the backdrop of a Discovery Channel interview with a guy in a lab coat...the lighting is dark and blue-ish and you see lasers and twirling DNA models). Anyway, I didn't do that because it would be a lot of work. But I did manage to take a couple pics during my bike ride to school in the morning.

This first one is me riding down Sand Hill road towards campus. The bike lanes are nice and wide, and the traffic lights respond to bikes as well! For artistic effect, I held the camera at my waist so that the handle bars were in the photo. Also, the pink building to the right that you can barely see is a Ronald McDonald House (the only one I've ever seen). So when you put money in the little box at McDonald's, it really does go somewhere.

This picture is actually on campus. On the left is the William Gates Computer Science building, and to the right is the Paul Allen Center for Integrated Systems (aka CIS) where I work. All in all, this was a pretty average day. Lots of sitting in my cube. I attended some good presentations by several people from The University of Twente in The Netherlands. They are in town for a conference next week in SF, which I'll attend along with most of my group. It's actually a pretty major conference for Electrical Engineers, but it always seems low-key when it's in your back yard.

At the end of the day, LL and I met up with some folks from school to have dinner and see The 39 Steps, by Alfred Hitchcock. The movie was very good, I thought. Lots of intentional and unintentional humor (like the helicopter special effects...you'd have to see it...)

So here is everyone who went to the movie. From left to right is Fernando, Alireza, LL, me, Kim, Jim and Pedram. Alireza and I are working together on the same chip. Fernando and Pedram (like Alireza) are both in the same research group as I am. Jim is "half way" in the group (my advisor is his co-advisor), and Kim is his girlfriend.

Kim also happens to be a neuroscientist at Stanford, and she said that recent construction near where she works is freaking out all the lab animals (they can apparently sense all the vibrations from the heavy machinery). This is actually a big problem for all the students who are testing with these animals, because their results will be influenced by sudden changes in behavior resulting from rumbling and bulldozing. Needless to say, Alireza and I are quite happy to work on a chip that is indifferent to all-but-fairly-direct interaction with a bulldozer.