And this will be me...

Did I mention that Kolywater is by far the coolest person that I have met at Irvine?

Five things about Southern California that keep me sane

Pictures of my girlfriend

Specifically the laminated pictures I have from a photo booth in an Osaka arcade after a night of bowling with some random drunken Japanese fellows. One of the men said I had the “animal eye”. It is impossible not to fall deeply in love with a person who has seen your Zoolander impression and will still agree to be seen with you in public.

103.1 FM

This has to be one of the greatest radio stations in the country. Today I heard Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols strumming and humming along a little T.Rex ditty. They also play Sinatra every day at five. And the station is good for any occasion, such as when you are overtaking a hearse during a funeral procession but do not realize it until it is too late and you have blasted Elvis Costello out of your windows at a dead person.

The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf

They do not over roast their beans and the Iced Blended is far superior to anything that has come out of the gaping pits of capitalist hell that is Starbucks. Any day that I exist without it in the dry heat of Southern California I feel like something is missing from my life... aside from moisture.

My cousin and her girlfriends

They are the reason I was in Artesia last weekend browsing the Bollywood titles in Indian mini-marts, and they are the reason I may be going to a party on an aircraft carrier this Saturday. I should probably give'em a little shout out. "I love my life!"

Baja sauce

I have no idea what they put into the Baja sauce, but it is like a spicy thin hollandaise that fits perfectly with grilled seafood. Only with crack.

Quickly scheming

Half an hour ago I investigated the possibility of writing a post on Lambda expressions, since the term has been popping up all over the place and it was something that I was curious about. After fifteen minutes, it became clear that I know nothing about functional programming and will have to learn Scheme or some equivalent in order to write with authority on the topic. Don Box seems to think that learning Scheme is worthwhile, however, and judging by the countless posts I am reading on the new language feature sets coming in C#, such knowledge will be useful in a couple of years. Therefore, ten minutes ago I decided to shelf the post and see if I could pick up Scheme over the course of the quarter as an extracurricular project. So basically this is a post on how I randomly find ways to make more work for myself.

If I wasn't so stupid I would be brilliant.

This is far from home

Tonight was my first night as a resident of Irvine. After moving my belongings into the area and settling in for the night, I can officially confirm that Irvine is remarkably unremarkable and so secure that my underwear is currently soaking in the sink. In other words, all commercial establishments close at nine o'clock and the apartment complex I am staying at takes the welfare of its residents so seriously that I don't have keys to the laundry facilities.

The only upside of the past five hours as a resident has been my environmentally friendly detergent purchase from Target. I love that detergent. It is the only sign of eco-awareness I have seen in Southern California, where I have yet to come across a single facility for recycling. That detergent, and also the Indian children riding their bikes around the development, have really pulled me through this night. Somehow, seeing them race up and down the block without worrying about what would happen next made me feel at home in the strange, strange land.

Yeah, baby... you know I'm an engineer

Yesterday I had my graduate student orientation at the University of California at Irvine Department of Informatics. During the hour and a half long parade of administrative stars, it became painfully clear that students getting their Master's degrees would not get the same level of care and attention as students on the Ph.D. track. Ph.D track students get their own private offices (with their own private telephone lines and private keys) in the department building and a $1,500 check for personal computers. Students on the Master’s track also get keys, but the keys are to a trailer. I am told there are computers in there. Bonus.

The second revelation I had that day happened after orientation during the campus wide barbeque and club fair. It seems that finding friends who share my interests and outlook might be difficult, as will finding nightlife in the rather straight-laced, conservative, and racially segregated townlet of Irvine. I did find a few individuals, however, that I am optimistic about for genuine friendship possibilities. Moreover, that list excludes the two Desi girls staffing the table for the “Indian Engineers Club”, who were trying to recruit every potential dot-not-feather boy in sight. Call me crazy, but those girls didn’t look dressed up to build bridges. They might have been trying to erect something though (Da-dum! Ching!).

I’ll be here all night, folks.

P.S. I jest with love. I'm sure the trailer is very well provisioned for graduate students in Informatics since the administrative staff has done a remarkable job so far. I am also sure that those girls were in no way trying to take advantage of thier looks to get young Indian men to join thier club. Well... I'm sure about the first one, anyway.

Atlas impressed

After reviewing the documentation on Atlas (a.k.a the .NET 2.0 Ajax libraries), I found a lot of the statements in the documentation regarding JavaScript misleading. While JavaScript may not be object-oriented or contain a robust exception handling framework, it is object-based and version 1.5 includes try/catch blocks that can throw any kind of object up the stack as well as runtime exceptions. Also the implication that the Atlas client script library introduces events and behaviors to the DHTML world is totally off the mark. And while the Atlas client script library may provide a more robust API to these capabilities than existed previously, if these capabilities were not built into JavaScript to a lesser degree in the first place it would have been impossible to build the Atlas library as it stands today. That said, the Atlas Client Script Llibrary itself is very impressive and should be fairly easy to port over to other web applications that do not use a .NET architecture. Not that I am suggesting that anyone do that. I wouldn't do something like that. Not me. No way.

Additionally, I did find quite a lot of articles on some of the interesting things going on under Atlas's hood in the course of my review. So if you are curious, here is an article on the XmlHttpRequest from Apple's Developer Connection (who knew?), another on AJAX courtesy of Simon Willison (I knew), and yet another on JSON via Dare Obasanjo (a personal hero far beyond my ability to know). JSON is a lightweight XML alternative that allows developers to express objects in a functional construction like syntax.

I don't even know what to call this... I saw the Constant Gardener though

I just finished watching The Constant Gardener. It really made me think about my life so far and whether I change the world for the better with my actions. Have I helped someone facing a struggle just to survive? Do I even take the time to pay attention to the fact that others face these struggles on a daily basis? And are my everyday economic and political actions, such as purchasing the clothes I wear or voting for or against certain propositions, making the world a better place?

The little things that we do or do not do in the name of following our own dreams add up to the world that we live in. Usually, to alleviate guilt and responsibility for those actions that created distress in the lives of others or our surrounding environment, we tend to claim ignorance of or helplessness regarding the effects our actions have caused. We typically do this because we didn’t want to pay attention to the potential negative effects our actions might have, or we were too lazy to even consider them, or we didn’t want to pay the price for doing things the right way, or we were too lazy to enact change. Rarely is the case for ignorance and helplessness in regards to past actions justified, although the current United States executive branch now is fantastic at justifying their actions based on those two arguments.

“There was nothing else we could have done.”

“We just didn’t know.”

Watching this movie made me realize that I personally cannot claim ignorance or helplessness as arguments for my actions, however, when I never took the time to find out what the resulting effects would be or attempted to find and enact and pay the price for a more positive action. To that end, I would like to start investigating the possibilities for groupware tools that enable individuals to link the effects of the actions of corporations and governments back to the responsible parties. This way people can be more aware of the actions as simple as buying a cup of coffee can have, and what other options are available. It might help me sleep a little better at night. And though the entire idea may turn out to be ridiculous after I’ve looked at the domain set of the problem, but you never know until you start to look.

If there is anything G.I Joe taught me, it is that knowing is half the battle.

Ponies!

I just finished reading the new whitepaper on XLinq, and although in my opinion it is a two trick pony for dealing with XML in a procedural programming model, the tricks that it has are stunning*. As in the pony does a back flip then juggles apples stunning. So, being the grammar maven that I am, the two things that I liked best are the functional construction of elements and the simplified API for processing and transversing elements. I love the current version of System.XML in the .Net framework because of the raw power it offers, but to be honest it is a pain in the ass to use. The API is so close the XML document object model that the resulting code is voluminous and hard to read because of all of the intermediary steps required to do anything. These new libraries simplify a lot of the work from a syntax point of view; so much so that dealing with XElements using XLinq should be very similar to the way that I would deal with DOM nodes in JavaScript. The only hesitation I have about all this newfangledness is that by taking full advantage of these libraries, programmers will face entire redesigns of systems if they ever decide to port anything over to other platforms, but that would probably happen anyway since porting is never quite as easy as you think it is.

Told you I was a dork… this is what happens when English majors become software engineers.

*I am not going to count the language-integrated query aspect of XLinq as one of the tricks since that’s a higher-level abstraction that deserves its own discussion. Yes, I know that is one of the most important parts. Yes, I am ashamed of myself.

I hate this feeling

Being without the woman I love and knowing that all I have to do to be in her arms again is get on a plane and never look back at what could have been in Southern California, while simultaneously not being able to get on that airplane because I know it would lead to a lifetime of looking back, is the hardest thing I've ever had to do emotionally, because that plane is just an hour and a couple hundred dollars away. I know that if I gave in and left graduate school behind for her (before it even started), I would be selling both of us and our future together short, but the logic of the argument doesn't make holding back easier. In any case, a month from now I'll be able to get on that plane and see her for a few days with a clear mind over my birthday weekend, and in any case our situation is trivial compared to what other couples have faced in their time.

In this very moment, I can understand all of the crazy things people do for love, such as pine very publicly and write in long sentences. At least there is a history of great men who have all done the same for women in thier days.

Storytime

There is an interesting article on MSNBC about the increasing emphasis on artistic skills in business due to the abundance of well-manufactured, inexpensive goods. To be functional is no longer good enough. These days a toilet plunger has to connect with you on a personal level in order for you to buy it, because all things being equal, any plunger will do the job. It is now the job of the businessperson not to create a better plunger, but to create a concept of the plunger that resonates with the common person, so they in turn can become a part of the plunging story.

Now the example may be foolish, but the underpinnings of the article are not if you consider the power that stories and mythology have in society. Sometimes I wonder if this blog is an attempt in some way to create a story about myself, one that will resonate with future employers and friends so they are compelled in some way to form relationships with me. Friendster and Flickr and MySpace and LiveJournal are all online entities that solely exist to facilitate the creation of personal mythologies in this manner, albeit in a strictly social context.

Rather makes me wonder if we are all just selling ourselves to each other, and if that’s the way it has always been.

... and I always wanted a Honda

I think that I can safely say that car dealerships are the creepiest places on the face of the earth. I had to go a couple yesterday because I thought that I could find a lease on a car by myself, but I was so wet behind the ears the dealers could see it dripping on my shoulders.

To be frank, I was almost taken advantage of at the Honda dealership in Santa Ana of all places… They might have the best freaking cars on the road, but the dealers were so aggressive that in retrospect it makes me want to sick up. Mental note that any time someone gives me a blank stare and asks why if I want to take time to think about it is desperately trying to take advantage of me and thinks that they have a good shot. Also, they kept on trying to get me to sign meaningless pieces of paper that they would scrawl some deal on in some strange attempt at fostering trust between us, and when I asked for time to do more research on the internet, they guided me to a kiosk looked over my shoulder as I checked out the Honda national website. They acted as if they were doing me some ridiculous favor with the pricing on the model I was interested in, but they weren't doing shit. I think that my favorite point in the conversation is when they asked if there was any price that they could write down that would get me to stay in the dealership and I said no, after which they asked again two more times.

I think they might have actually moved past creepy to despicable.

Impressions of the city of angels...

My first five days in the Los Angeles area have been both harder and easier than I was expecting. Finding an apartment was easier than I thought it would be, and I even wound up with a cool roommate who runs his own successful new media company with his brother in Irvine. Getting all of the administrative paperwork taken care of for school, however, was far harder than I thought it would be. Yesterday I had to make an emergency trip down to Irvine from my cousin's apartment in West Hollywood to ensure that I would have my student loan check by the final deadline for paying my fees. That trip takes about an hour normally, but if you're traveling on Tuesday in the afternoon it takes a little over one and half times as long and you sit there wondering why they had to spread the metropolitan area out like that and if it's some kind of manifest destiny thing.

Another thing about Southern California is that racial tension is something that you can feel on your skin out in Orange County, and it's not something that I am used to coming from New York because all the different ethnic groups mixed socially. Out here, everyone stays within his or her ethnic groups, if what I observed at the University Center (a.k.a. the university strip mall) is any form of indication. There were the Chinese kids all sitting at their table, and then the Japanese kids at theirs and the Indians off on their own (UCI is Asian-tastic) and it just made me sad. My social objective over the first semester is going to be to make very good friends with one person of every ethnicity I can find and break down these self-imposed barriers.

My spiritual objective is to get the school to change their goddamned student identification cards because they are the ugliest things I have ever seen. A photorealistic image of an anteater statue on a rock does not a well-designed identification card make.

Now if you will excuse me, I have to go re-register for classes because I was just informed yesterday by my cousin that the school year consists of three quarters (don't ask about the logic behind that) and my current schedule of sixteen credits this "quarter" will destroy me over a two and a half month period.

P.S. I really wish the PDC was taking place next week instead of this one... this one is too crazy for me to even think about attending.