4 x 10k relay

I ran in a 10k relay yesterday afternoon, along with 3 of my co-workers. We finished in 52:52, which translates to an average of about 8:30 per mile. I think I was probably slightly slower than average, so probably about 8:40 or 8:45 per mile, for 1.55 miles. That would make it my fastest run since junior high, for distances between 1 and 2 miles. Yay me.

geeks go shopping

This xkcd comic is so descriptive of me that it kills me:


I've referenced it like two or three times in conversation already over the past few months, but it's really hard to explain a comic out loud.

who's serving the country, anyway?

I read a blog post recently about the demographics of US military servicepeople that surprised me. Apparently , enlisted recruits in the American military are disproportionately upper and middle class. Furthermore, whites and blacks are about equally represented (with respect to the general population), while Hispanics are underrepresented. Somehow I had the impression that more of our soldiers were minorities from low-income backgrounds. I'm kind of happy to have been wrong.

further adventures in food

There have been many adventures in food recently, and I'm way behind on blogging about them, but I'll start at the beginning anyway.

A few weeks ago, I finally made it to Chez Panisse. I'd been too lazy to make the effort, but my friend starting calling at 9am exactly a month before our desired date, and managed to secure a 9:15pm Friday reservation after calling for about 30 minutes.

Anyway, Friday evening we trekked out to Berkeley, where we were fed a four-course prix fixe. The menu changes every day (and there is only one menu per day) so we didn't know what we were going to get until a few days before. I unfortunately forgot to copy down the menu so this is from memory...

The first course was a salad of greens, tomatoes, and beans. What struck me about this salad was the amazing variety of ingredients; every tomato was a different type, and there were at least three kinds of beans. I'm not a huge tomato fan but I ate all but one (the largest).


Next up was (unfortunately for me) a salmon dish, with lemon and capers. I had them replace it with the vegetarian option, which turned out to be a zucchini. All reports were good, though. In fact, one person said this was his favorite dish of the evening.


For the third course, we had squab with figs and mushrooms. I sometimes don't like squab, but in this case it was very well prepared, and this was my favorite dish. The sauce was surprisingly light considering it had fig in it, and the figs themselves were very flavorful.


For dessert, we had a raspberry clafouti. I think I am just not that fond of clafoutis. I feel like they should be poufier, either like a puff pastry, or like a bread pudding. Alternatively, they should be more custard-y. As far as clafoutis go, this one was pretty good, and the ice cream was yummy.


Overall, it was a very satisfying meal. Although it might have been more awe-inspiring to have gone years ago, when not every restaurant in the Bay Area was serving locally grown organic seasonal ingredients, it was still great to have finally experienced the restaurant which invented California cuisine.

No on 8

I am a big supporter of allowing people to do whatever they want as long as they aren't hurting other people, so of course I support gay marriage.

I was commenting to a gay friend that he should realize that if he's legally allowed to marry, then he'll be subject to all of the parental and/or pressure that the rest of us face about marriage. Which, for the record, sucks. Then again, why should gay people get an exemption? Maybe we should all have to deal with our fair share of parental nagging.

All joking aside, I'm very happy for him, my other gay friends, and the entire pro-marriage gay community. On the downside, now that gay marriage is legal, my whole "I'm not getting married until everyone can, in solidarity with the gay community" spiel is totally busted. Ah well.

close calls

Several members of my family were (and are still being) pretty badly affected by Hurricane Ike.

Those living in Galveston were recently able to return to their house, only to find flood damage to about five feet. Photo albums, documents, and childhood memories were lost, along with all of the electrical appliances, including a fairly nice living room TV setup. They are currently living with relatives in Houston until the structure can be inspected for safety and salvageability.

Those living in Houston escaped with only inconveniences. For days, there was no electricity, paved roads were flooded, gas stations were out of gas, and many supermarkets were closed. Even now, millions of homes in Houston are still without power. The good news is that everyone is safe, has food and water, and is in good health.

After hearing the news, I was thinking it's not uncommon for disasters affect people only one or two degrees of separation away. For instance, I recently heard that a friend's mother was a regular commuter on the route of the train that crashed last weekend in Los Angeles. She in fact got off the train one stop before the crash.

Another friend was at home in Sri Lanka during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and barely escaped by clinging to a tree. Two of his other friends survived as well, but one was lost to the waves and never found.

And, of course, there were the 9/11 attacks. Living in California, I was less affected than many, but even I knew of some friends of friends who died on those airplanes. One of those cases was particularly sad: I was originally supposed to go to my second cousin's wedding that year, but it was postponed because her maid of honor was on Flight 11, on her way to the wedding, and never made it.

I'm not sure what this means. Are the people that I know are lucky (in the close call cases), or unlucky, or is the planet (or country) just that small? Maybe there are only one, two, or three degrees of separation, rather than six, for most of us in today's interconnected world.

blue-green blindness?

Apparently I just love online tests. Here's a hue discrimination test I just took. I scored a 4, with all the mistakes falling in the blue-green border:

the cynical fan

I missed watching the Niners game last weekend because I was in Hawaii at a wedding. This conversation took place shortly after I arrived back in California on the Monday morning redeye:

D:	Did you see the score for the Niners game?
me:	No. I don't want to.
D:	They won.
me:	Very funny.
D:	No, really.
me:	Really? What? Let me see!

fringe benefits

A friend of mine recently changed jobs and came to work at my company. She actually switched from being an engineer to being a project manager, but here, lots of non-engineers wear jeans and T-shirts too. Paraphrased from a conversation we had over the weekend:

"Not only am I wearing jeans and T-shirts, I'm wearing a backpack again! Now, when someone on the street asks me for money, I can say that I'm a poor student and he'll believe me!"

we're winning!

The following conversation took place at a dinner party last week after we'd discovered that yet another friend was pregnant:

friend #1:	Omigod! Not another one! Okay guys, remember, this is not a competition.
friend #2:	Of course it is. It's like "Survivor". We're winning.

Now I have "Another One Bites the Dust" stuck in my head. Heh.

3.5 years to go

Looks like Ma Ying-Jeou's approval rating has fallen to below 40% in the five months since he became president. That's what happens when you venerate former dictators and undermine your own country's sovereignty in the international arena.

I wonder how many of those 60% of disapproving voters voted for Ma during the election, believing his campaign promises not to sell out Taiwan? I wonder if any of them realized how stupid that was and attended the 100-day rally against him, which drew somewhere between 50,000 and 200,000 protesters?

There's a lot of "I told you so" floating around in my head in a pool of bitterness. Sigh.

(vice) presidential politics

I don't watch the Daily Show on a regular basis, but I have friends who do, and they send me clips like this. Brilliant, but almost not funny. More like "WTF???". Bleah.

Honestly, I think John McCain is a good guy and a war hero (although I don't think he should be president) but his VP pick Sarah Palin is really creeping me out.

First there was the whole ethics investigation into whether Palin fired the state police chief because he wouldn't fire her sister's ex-husband.

Then we heard about her book-banning episode. That's two points in the "abuse of power" column.

Next up, de-separation of church and state! Apparently Palin thinks that the war in Iraq is God's plan (sound familiar?).

To top it off, she thinks that God wants us to drill for oil in Alaska. Really? I mean, I'm not religious, so I could be totally mistaken and maybe the Christian God cares about all sorts of trivialities, but that sounds pretty darned specific to me.

I also find it ironic that she line-item vetoed funding for a program that provides a transitional home for teenage mothers. I guess the message is that it's laudable to be a teenage mother ("We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby..." -- Sarah Palin) but only if you have parents who will pay for your housing.

fun and games

Over Labor Day weekend I went to a games night at a friend's house, where we played several of the usual games (Settlers, etc.), and then followed those with a round of Taboo and a round of Trivial Pursuit, Millenium Edition.

Usually we play Taboo with guys against girls, and the girls have a pretty high winning percentage. However, the last time we played I accidentally sabotaged my team while trying to describe the word "pregnant":

me:	Hmm. If you're a girl, sometimes after you have sex you become...
teammate:	(confidently, no hesitation) sore!
me:	???
same teammate:	chafed! irritated!

At this point we all turned around to look at her boyfriend accusingly, before collapsing with laughter. As I recall, our scores deteriorated horribly after that.

This time, there was no such disturbing episode, the girls beat the guys soundly, and we decided to mix up the teams for Trivial Pursuit.

Around 2am we were still nowhere near done, and one of the girls wanted to go home to her two kids, so we played a "sudden death" round where each team tried to answer all six of the questions on the same card, and then we compared to see who had the most correct answers. In the end it came down to me correctly guessing "Marcus Allen" as the oldest active NFL running back in 1997. Yay for useless sports trivia!