Erin Campbell's shower and skinny jeans

Last weekend, LL and I flew to Austin for her old roommate's wedding shower and bachelorette party (not to be confused with LL's sister's bachelorette party, to be taking place this coming weekend in San Francisco and requiring me to find a place other than my apartment to sleep Friday). LL's old roommate's name is Erin Campbell and she is marrying Barrett Naman, a 7 ft. tall lawyer who gets hungry every 15 minutes (Erin has been advised by Barrett's mom to always carry snacks for Barrett so that he doesn't eat any small animals). Actually, speaking of small animals, I have a warning for Barrett that I will convey by means of example:

Pictured left is Gunnar, a friend of mine who recently married into joint ownership of a froufrou dog named Lulu. Gunnar is taking Lulu for a walk (he is also staring down the neighbor who, Gunnar is convinced, is throwing dirty looks his way...we love Gunnar). He's begging "Lou" (as he likes to call her...I think in a vain attempt to make Lulu more manly) to take care of business so she can be left at home for a while (for the shower in fact). Unfortunately, she prefers to use the nice indoor carpet rather than the rough outside grass.

Why should this concern Barrett? Well, Erin also has a pet...not a froufrou dog, however. Erin has a vicious cat named Gracie:



This isn't an exact picture of Gracie (like many exotic, under-the-bed dwelling creatures, Gracie is difficult to capture on film. The above composite image was constructed by Stanford researchers and is based on eyewitness interviews). Like this aggressive, man-eating hell-tiger, Gracie likes to crouch, hidden, near a water source (such as a toilet) and spring out upon her victim suddenly. Another likeness between Gracie and this I-sharpen-my-claws-on-the-rocks beast: they are both male. And you wonder why 'Gracie' has a short fuse?

So, Barrett, be careful about intruding upon Gracie unawares, or you may wish you were instead walking, say, a Bichon down Westheimer in a pair of skinny jeans (like Gunnar will be doing shortly, we are sure).

Anyway...on to the actual shower...

Erin and Barrett's shower was at J. Blacks, a bar on West 6th street in Austin. We got our own section of the bar cordoned off, like so:

Private party. That's us. Chic. We also had high-def televisions at either end of our reservation, so that you could watch the NCAA tournament over the shoulder of whoever** you were talking to. All in all, a nice setup.


Here are all the hostesses involved with the party, plus Erin. From left to right it's Christina, Erin H.G.S.etc., Amy, Erin C., LL, Emily and Candice (Lulu's mom). There were also 5 guys hosting the party, but we didn't pose for a group photo.


Here are the party favors and some of the food. My favorite item, not shown, were the miniature hamburgers. They were low-fat because they were so small. The little blue things are gumball machine party favors...you'll see them better in a sec.


The tags say "Have a Ball with Erin and Barrett." I agree it doesn't sound that great, but we couldn't think of anything better. If you've ever had to come up with something like this (if you live with a graphic designer, you have to come up with crap like this all the time), you know how hard it is -- how much harder these little arbitrary decisions can be than the big important ones.

No one will remember what these tags say! If you ask Erin, out of the blue, "Hey, what did the tags say on your gumball machine party favors?", she'll be like "I don't now..." (Or if you ask Barrett... "What gumball machines? You got gumballs? I'm hungry..."). I mean you know, going in, that you will never recoup the effort invested in coming up with a smashing party favor tag, yet you have to put something on there. My personal favorite suggestion was "Party Balls" (in honor of one of LL's sorority sisters from back in the day who brought this gauche phrase into one of their, I'm sure, refined meetings) but even I knew better than to actually use it.

Anyway, Have a Ball with Erin and Barrett! Yay.


In addition to being a shower, it was also Barrett's birthday. We sang to him and everything, sort of. Here's Amy putting candles on one of his two cakes (I'm telling you, the guy can EAT).


So one danger of stretching your arm around someone and clicking the camera is that you don't have any control over what your picture might look like. Come to think of it, that's probably the only danger, and really that's not even dangerous. In this case, I caught Barrett at an oblique, up the nose, angle. He looks like he's blowing out the candles, but he's really attempting to hoover the icing off both cakes at once. We also got tall skinny candles in honor of: a) Barrett, b) Gunnar's future jeans. (take your pick).


The aftermath. Can you do this to a cake from 2 feet away? Somebody feed Barrett.

So, another aspect of the evening that I haven't mentioned is about Other Erin and Bryan (Sorry EGS, but, as it's EC's shower, you have to be "Other Erin"). Quote from Other Erin (addressing a crowd): "One thing that you all may not know about Bryan is that he will try anything on." Thus, continuing on our skinny jeans theme, and having fully gotten everyone's attention, did she go on to tell us about Bryan's shopping trip in hipsterland. I didn't get the whole story (there was basketball on, after all), but I'm pretty sure it involved the phrase, "Bring me the tightest jeans you have....no, tighter." Sad, Bryan.


This picture is blurry, but had to be used. Em is playing the gumball machines like maracas. It was THAT kind of evening.

Host gifts! I'm assuming that Amy (like LL and I) got a gift certificate to a restaurant. Erin gave GC's to all the hostesses in order to ensure that she will be the only one fitting into her dress at the wedding. It's called the "relativity diet," which, recognizing that "good looks" are primarily a comparative measure, attempts to simply add 5 lbs to everyone you know. Amy does look super-happy about her gift! Though not as happy as...

...Fisher. Fisher gets the Field & Stream Award for pulling out his pocket knife (actually still protracted in the photo above) to open his host gift. He's thrilled!

** I know I'm supposed to use whomever in this case (pun intended)...I knowingly flaunt many a grammatical rule in favor of sounding conversational and not stuffy. I also unknowingly flaunt lots of other grammatical rules, but at least you don't know which are which.

My 32nd Birthday

Of course, by "my" 32nd birthday, I mean "I, Clay," am writing this post, not LL, who is much, much younger (with our age difference, I'm surprised our wedding was even legal).

I've mentioned this to a few people, but 32 is a significant birthday. It's a power of 2, meaning it's a binary milestone (I just went from 011111 to 100000). Of course most 10-fingered folk like to celebrate a little extra each time you travel around the sun a multiple of 10 times, but base 2 is certainly a much more universal concept (5-fingeredness isn't even a dominant trait). 32 also happens to be the freezing point of water, but that's about as non-universal as you can get (arbitrary in every way, right down to the "Standard Temperature and Pressure" of planet earth). Anyway, I'm pretty excited about 32. I don't get another power of 2 till I'm 64...we'll see if I'm celebrating then.

So to celebrate the fact that I now require a 6-bit number to record my age, LL took me to dinner. On the recommendation of my friend Henry at school (or, "Dr. Nho," as he will be known in a few months), we drive over to the town of Pescadero on the ocean side of the Peninsula. The restaurant is called Duarte's, and Henry has been raving about their pies for months. Mmmm...pie.

Anyway, here we are on our way out to the restaurant. It's an hour drive along the twistiest road this side of Dramamine. The sun had just set on the Pacific when we stopped at a small cliff overlooking a sandy beach. The colors in the sky were still pretty and we struck a quick pose. I guess I could have shaved for my birthday. Oh well.

Here's Duarte's. I actually took this pic when we left (that's why it's so dark compared to the previous one), so these shots are a little out of order.

This is inside Duarte's. It actually has a bar section and a restaurant section. This is part of the restaurant section and you can see back into the kitchen. The bar area was also really cool, except that there was no music at all. I guess some people like a really quiet bar. The bartender was possibly 100 (not in binary). I think I could see myself as a regular here if we lived nearby (and if I had no ambitions beyond drinking at a familiar bar).

So here's me tackling the Dungeness Crab Cioppino. Cioppino is sort of like a crab boil in Louisiana, except that it's not spicy and has more of an Italian seasoning. It's really good! But the mechanics are similar to a crab boil...you pretty much have to rip the thing apart with your bare hands to eat it (only instead of serving it on a giant picnic table, they give you a dainty little bib. I didn't wear the bib). One other difference with a Louisiana crab boil is that these things are HUGE. The bodies of them (not counting legs) can be 8-10 inches across. Eating one of them will fill you up!


Here's evidence that I made short work of the giant crab. You might also notice that I have a full beer (Guiness). That's because my hands were covered in delicious crab juice, which I did not want to soil my beer glass with. I'm classy like that.

Everything was delicious. I didn't mention it, but for an appetizer we had some killer fried oysters...perfectly done. And for desert I got an olallieberry pie (sort of a cross between a rasberry and a blackberry), and LL got a blueberry pie...both a la mode. We call this the Beach Diet.

Grillin with Bart

Saturday, Bart invited us over to grill some burgers at his and Liz's place. We always say yes to these invitations because we don't have a grill of our own.

Mmmmm...burgers. Liz actually prefers to eat vegetarian most days, but she was out of town. This means we made three of the biggest fattest burgers you can imagine. They were good.


There's Bart, manning the grill, and LL, enjoying the deck. Isnt' the deck at their place awesome. It's up on the roof of the condo they own in Palo Alto. In the (whited out) background is part of the Stanford campus.

This is the wine we were having as kind of a small celebration of my completion of the Masters requirements. We got the wine for Christmas from LL's brother Lawson, and we'd been saving it for a special occasion. The wine was very good...as good a bottle as I've had in the past couple years. It was recommended by the sommelier at Commanders Palace in New Orleans where Lawson works.

Note about the Masters: As of today (when I checked online to see that I indeed passed the one class I had last quarter), I'm at least guaranteed not to leave Stanford empty handed. I still have a few classes left and some publishing to do to complete the PhD requirements, but it's nice to feel like I'm making some progress.

We left Bart's with a few vegetables. See what he does, Liz? You leave town and Bart gives away all the vegetables and eats hamburgers.

Actually, Bart and Liz get a box of fresh vegetables every week from local farmers. LL and I are always happy to take a little off their hands when they get more than they need. This week we were the proud recipients of a Leek, some rutabagas, and something that might be lettuce.

Ski Trippin

We went skiing last weekend, sort of on a whim. At least, whim-worthy in terms of fiscal responsibility. Greg called us a few weeks ago and just kept planning things while we waffled about it. Before we knew it, we were driving to Tahoe. Greg has that sort of power. It's kindof a wreckless persistence imbued with you'll-regret-it-if-you-miss-out-edness. Anyway, it worked. We skied. We liked it. All hail Greg.

First, let me tell you about snow chains...or more pertinently, how LL and I came to own our very first set of snow chains...

There are a couple different ways to get from the Bay Area to Tahoe, but all of them involve going through the Sierra Nevada mountains (that's the way mountains are, see). We decided to drive along Hwy 50 since it's the most direct route. We left on Friday afternoon so that we could maximize our time on the road with the million other bad skiers heading to the resorts for the weekend. Problem is, not only can none us ski, we also have no idea how to drive in snow (I think most people on the Peninsula just stay home if it isn't sunny and 70 degrees...no sense risking a drive on a cloudy day).

As we enjoyed the bumper-to-bumper traffic winding up into the Sierra Nevadas, we started seeing signs that said, "All vehicles that don't have snow tires with 4WD must carry snow chains." We didn't have snow tires/chains/anything, but we'd made this drive before IN JANUARY and didn't need chains...surely we wouldn't need them now in mid-March, right? There wasn't even any snow on the ground yet (about this time I remarked to LL that I hoped there would be some new snow on the slopes...stupid, stupid thing to say). But as we went along, it did get snowy and the road turned white and there were more flashy signs. But we were also aware of our odometer, which said we only had like 10 more miles till Tahoe. So we drove past the "You can buy chains here on the side of the highway and we'll even put them on for you in the snow for way too much money" place and onward to Echo Summit.

It would not have been too bad, except that our Xterra is rear-wheel drive. We knew we were in trouble when, about 1000 ft. past the chain sellers, some guys in a red pickup truck were slowly drifting by in the wrong lane, no traction from their back wheels whatsoever. So...long story short, we did make it over just fine. But I was really frightened to death the whole time. Not about dying or anything...traffic was only moving about 10 MPH, so worst case we'd get stuck on the side of the road and have to wait for some tow truck driver to pull us out while a police officer wrote us a huge ticket for being idiots. But I was still really worried about that.

The lesson is, carry chains! Really, really, really. They aren't kidding. We bought some the next morning before skiing or anything. As Murphy's law dictates, we didn't need them for the rest of the trip, but it was still a great purchase. A wonderful, beautiful penance of a purchase. And one of these days, I'll learn how to actually put them on the car.

We eventually got to the condo, desperately in need of a drink (ironically, we had a bucket of beer in the back of the Xterra ON ICE. Seriously, we brought our own ice to the blizzard. Idiots). But the condo, it turns out, was awesome. Greg knows how to spend your money. Three floors, amazing view of Lake Tahoe from up in the mountains, private hot tub, heated bathroom floors (quite possibly LL's favorite feature). It was sweet.

Five of us stayed there. Greg, Lyren, Albert, LL and me (LL was really a trooper about being the only girl). You could have made a sitcom out of it...probably most closely resembling Big Bang Theory.

This is LL the morning after our harrowing arrival with her new friend. This dog just came galumphing up out of the snow to tell us good morning on our way to the car. You could tell he was a snow rescue dog because he went straight to LL and sat on her feet, which were cold. He takes his job quite seriously. Believe it or not (actually, I'm sure you belive it), LL was pretty sad to leave him behind and go skiing. As we climbed into the car, he bounded back to his snow pile and burrowed in it. Weird snow dog.


Here's Greg right out front of the Heavenly Gondola (Heavenly is the name of the ski resort we skied at...the Gondola takes you from South Lake Tahoe up to the slopes). It was snowing pretty well. A good sign! In this photo, Greg looks 7 feet tall. Greg is not 7 feet tall.

This is LL and I (actually right in front of Greg). LL is positively the cutest snow bunny in history. Love the red hat!

Here's an action shot of LL. My photography skills failed to capture any sign of movement. But there was movement. Really.

What's really funny, is that LL was moving faster in the previous picture than in this one. It's all in the pose. I'm still loving the red hat.

Here's me. Skiing pictures are difficult. Oh well. At least the slopes weren't crowded. I think it's generally best if I ski without anyone directly downhill of me.

In case you don't know, Tahoe is on the Nevada border. This means there are casinos in the half of the city that is on the Nevada side. LL won $5 on her first bet at a dollar slot machine and promptly stopped. We used our winnings to pay a bridge toll on the way home. THAT's how frugal we are!!

This has to go down as one of the oddest poses I've captured on...pixels. Clockwise from the dork at 6 pm, we have Greg, LL, Lyren and Albert. We're all in an elevator leaving the Casino. LL is smiling because she just won $5. I don't know what Greg's doing, but Albert really likes it.

Most of our crew doesn't gamble much, so we left the casino to find some place more like a bar. We found such a place!

Greg and Lyren played Centipede while the rest of us enjoyed sitting. Few things feel as good after a day of skiing as a good sit.

Oh yeah...this fish was also at the bar. I found him quite mesmerizing. Question though: does this mean he is looking back at me, or, since this fish is more prey than predator with his eyes on the sides of his body, is this fish looking everywhere but at me. Stop ignoring me, fish! Look at me!


This picture was taken at the top of one of the lifts. You can see Lake Tahoe behind us. I'm embarrassed to say how long it took for us to maneuver into this pose.

This is us after our last day of skiing (we skied Sat, Sun, Mon) about to drive back home. Check out how dirty the car is! We've been pretty proud of it (so proud that we haven't bothered to clean it).

Hasta la vista

Yesterday I downgraded from Windows Vista to Windows XP. I really did want to like Vista...I'm not one of those people that complains about everything Microsoft does. In fact I thought Vista's user interface was nice and I'm going to miss the little spinny blue halo that the pointer turns into when the OS writes checks that the hardware can't cache...man that was a terrible pun. Though really not much worse than the pun in the title of this post, which LL made up, thank you very much.

Despite the nice interface and the shiny halo, Vista had been a giant pain. It didn't run some applications that I need for school, and much (much, much) worse than that, it crashed on me all the time. I even got the occasional BSD, which I'd hoped was a thing of the past. I'm probably going to wait a year or two before I look at Vista again.

The process of downgrading was a bit tumultuous...some people think that I'm a "computer guy," but that's completely false. Assuming I can fix a computer is like assuming that a guy who makes propellers can fly a plane. I'm especially leery of performing surgery on my own laptop. I feel like I'm never going to get it working perfectly (btw, people who do like to take their computers apart always end up with some pieced together Dell-enstein that requires perpetual maintenance...strikingly reminiscent of 1980's shade-tree mechanics, who, despite knowing "a whole lot" about cars, never seem to have one working reliably...actually, continuing that analogy, I want to own the computer equivalent of a Honda Accord). Reluctantly, I had to dig into the whole process yesterday and learn a bunch of stuff that I hope to forget soon. I'm not going to explain it because it's boring. Well, actually it was a little fun for me because I'm nerdy, but I don't want to relive it by writing about the whole thing, and no one would read it if I did.

Oh...but I DO want to put in a plug for nlite. This really handy, free piece of software lets you create a windows installation disk with drivers already added. Using nlite, I made my own windows installer that would recognize my hard drive in AHCI mode instead of ATA mode...similar to what this guy did (except I have a Dell, not a Toshiba). I liked nlite enough to send the developer $7 (I can't decide if that's a little low or not...I think most people probably never send the guy any money since you can download it for free. I just wanted so send him a few bucks since he saved me some time).

After slogging through the technical aspects of the installation (I no longer have ANY big yellow question marks in my device manager...a sure sign of success!), I had to activate Windows XP. I read online that you do this by calling customer support to get a product key, so I call them I did.

First I got an automated gal who I refused to speak back to. I don't mind phone menus operated by touchtone, I just hate the voice recognition stuff. I remained resolutely silent through all the "I'm sorry, I didn't understand your response" stuff until she said "...or just press 1" -- well thank you! See, I don't mind pressing 1. I don't mind the menu. I understand your need to funnel calls to the right people. Just don't make me sit in my quiet cube and shout ridiculous commands into the phone! I followed this process and got a product key(!), but, due to the way the process went, I am sure that the license I have is not what I should have (I'm pretty sure they think I have a site license for Stanford, not a personal license). I want to follow the rules and get the right kind of key.

So...eventually I talked to a guy in India who was something of an upgrade to Robo-gal, but my needs were just outside the standard activation process (I even tried to reverse engineer his questioning sequence in a way that would lead us where we needed to go, but I failed badly). The problem is that my system was working perfectly. It was impossible to explain this subtlety...that nothing was broken and I just wanted to make sure my product key was for Clay Daigle's personal use and not part of some site license for Stanford or anything like that. My favorite part of the exchange was this:

SupportGuy: What do you see on your screen right now?
Me: A big green field.
SupportGuy: A what?
Me: A big green field. There are some clouds behind it.
SupportGuy: A big green what?
Me: Field. Like a pasture.
SupportGuy: I'm sorry. I can't understand you.
Me: Would you like me to click the Start button? Maybe that would move us along.
SupportGuy: Please click on the Start button...

If you think that conversation led to a successful conclusion, you are an idiot. After that, I was told to call some licensing people at a different phone number. This time I talked to a woman who I'm almost certain was in the U.S. (in any case, she wasn't constrained by a script). She was also very nice and told me I needed to enter my old Vista key in the Windows XP license window (she didn't know how to "undo" the previous key that I got, but I'll figure that out).

What I ultimately decided was that Microsoft doesn't care at all about my copy of XP. I was really just trying to do the right thing and make sure that I was using a personal license that I owned, but most of the people I talked to couldn't figure out why I was calling when everything was already working. I will say that now my conscience is clear about the whole thing, which was the main purpose behind it all.

On the bright side, I now have a completely working computer with an OS that I'm happy with. Yay! Now I can get back to work.

A few fun pics

We were in the city yesterday and I took a few fun pictures. It's basically a few things that LL passes everyday when she commutes.

The Brickhouse is a great little bar with good burgers. We've been here a couple times. It's only two blocks from the train station, so it's a convenient location. LL walks by here all the time!

She also walks by the post office. Unfortunately, it is closed. In fact, LL's been carrying around a package that we can't quite seem to get in the mail. Stupid post office.

This is the inside of the Caltrain station. It's really pretty nice, as far as train stations go.

And there's the platform. Yay. I like the train because I only ride it once or twice a month. LL likes it too, but she's not so fascinated with it anymore after 2.5 years of riding it everyday.

Poster session

This past Friday, Stanford invited prospective students to campus for a chance to see the place and talk to some profs. It's really a recruiting event...Stanford wants to convince admitted electrical engineering graduate students to come here instead of Berkeley or MIT or wherever. Not ALL of the admitted students are invited, just the ones that the admissions people think are the most promising. For the record, Stanford didn't invite me to anything like that after I was admitted, but I went ahead and tried hard in school anyway. It seems to be working out. Also, for the record, I'm not claiming I could do a better job than the Stanford admissions people of reading though a pile of applications and predicting the best future student researchers.

Part of the day's events was a two-hour poster session set up in the main electrical engineering building, giving prospective students the chance to go around and see what kinds of work we do. My research partner, Alireza, and I put up a poster of our own. I was really very surprised by the questions we got. I expected to meet a lot of hotshots eager to impress me with how smart they are, but most people asked honest, useful questions about Stanford. How do you get into a research group? How do you get a project? Which advisors are the best? I was impressed.


Here is our poster. Alireza is taping it to a foam core board. I did a lot of the work, but he did a lot more. It looked really great.

Here is our humble corner of the poster session. These first four posters belong to

1. Drew, who is co-advised by Boris Murmann
   
2. Alireza and I, both advised by Murmann
3. Wei, again a Murmann student, and
   
4. Paul, from Simon Wong's group
   

At this point we're waiting for the throngs of interested students to appear. The turnout was fair.

Sushi Night...a week ago

Sorry, but we've gotten a little behind with the blog. You might think this is because we are busy or something like that, but the truth is that I just wasn't all that inspired to write anything. Actually, I'm not very inspired right now either, but I think it's important to go ahead and just get this stuff up anyway. It's not "writer's block" (employing a liberal interpretation of the word "writer"), it's just "writer's blah" (straightforward interpretation of "blah").

So...you ready for some uninspired blogging? You're going to go through with it, even though I'm telling you ahead of time that it's not going to be very good? Actually, I'd really appreciate it if you would. I mean if you think reading an uninspired post is tough, you should try writing one! You'll spend 5 minutes reading something that's not very good. I'm going to spend 30 minutes writing something that's not very good. Much harder. :)

Well, last Saturday, Liz and Bart invited us over for sushi. It was fun. They also invited another couple, Jeremy and Anita, who were both fun. Liz did all the preparing, though Bart, as is custom, was probably put in charge of something that Liz was sure he couldn't mess up. Whatever the logistics, it all worked out to the benefit of my stomach (more in the beauty-on-the-inside sense rather than the beauty-on-the-outside sense).

Here is the table set with miso soup and a big plate of vegetable tempura.


A little later on we started on the actual sushi part. We mostly just made rolls, though after a while I got pretty gluttonous with the huge plate of raw salmon and tuna. L&B bought it from Cooks Seafood (ironic right?), a local place here in Menlo Park, and it was as good as any sushi-grade fish I've had. I don't know how much they paid for it, so I can't give you any hints on the relative cost of eating sushi out vs. making it yourself. Of course, the relative cost of drinks is pretty predictable, and we saved a lot on that front.


Here's Bart and Anita. Liz was sitting to Bart's left...in fact all of the couples were sitting together "as couples", but I split them up in the pictures by accidentally starting out in an off-by-one manner. Actually, this is the sort of indexing problem that plagues all of my efforts to write software.

So next over are Jeremy and LL. You might be thinking that she reminds you of My Favorite Martian, but those are really just chop sticks. She likes to dress in theme.

Last is Me and Liz. Check out my "Okie doke" shirt. LL's sister, Melissa, got it for me for Christmas. Isn't it cool?