Friday, July 20, 2007, 12:17 - General
Tuesday evening I arrived in Brooklyn at an inopportune time with respect to the bus schedule, so I walked from the subway stop home, stopping along the way at the grocery store. There I again ran into the girl who'd noticed my Google shirt pre-Gawker, and this time I again was wearing a Google shirt. She told me about a showing of Dazed and Confused in McCarren Park that night, but I'm far too busy for such things. Instead I ate food that Qi-Qi had cooked for me in my absence including some delicious mashed potatoes and retired early to bed.Wednesday night was the intern trip to the Yankees game, and Qi-Qi had plans to meet up with her friend Kristina who lives in Harlem. Thus the further plan was for me to meet them at Kristina's after the game, but just before me and my intern posse left for the Bronx we heard via modern technology of the explosion at Grand Central. Luckily at least the trains going to the stadium were unaffected. The game itself was pretty boring, as I expected a baseball game to be for someone who just doesn't care about sports. I had a good time nonetheless, getting to know some of the interns a bit better, but I sure wish the bleachers section wasn't alcohol free. :) My ride to Harlem was also unaffected by the explosion, but my phone battery had died so I only had the address to find the place. I made it there, but they didn't seem to hear the buzzer so I waited outside for around 10 minutes before some guy going inside said he'd knock on their door for me and they came down to let me in. I was a bit flustered, as I didn't have my keys and didn't really know the best way home. We hung out there for a short while, and I'm sure that I slipped quite deeply into a Midwestern drawl (Kristina's from Michigan), and then we were off taking a bus to the A line and then the A to 8th Ave to catch the L (here's where the explosion hurt us the most). It took forever and when we got to Brooklyn at around 1:45 the bus wasn't running anymore. Qi-Qi was totally dead tired so we hailed a cab the rest of the way and passed out.
The next day I got up quite late (9) so I had to work until past 8pm. On my way out after work these two guys stopped me by asking me whether I work at Google - I'm not sure how I feel about the amount of attention these T-shirts get me. We talked for 10 minutes or so, them having just been inside to visit some other intern they know, about random crap related to the one guy's distaste for "corporations" and love of "spirituality" and "philosophy" - ugh. He did try and teach me how to say something funny in Mandarin for Qi-Qi but I couldn't remember it and just went off to meet her in SoHo where she was studying at a *gasp* Starbucks (a particular corporation for which I have distaste). We wandered up Broadway in order to stop at a bookstore, this one being Shakespeare's just across from my future office. There we petted a cat and I bought a Nabokov novel (I've embarrassingly only ever read Lolita by him) and we talked about William Burroughs and then headed home to sleep.
This morning Qi-Qi rode the public transport with me into the city to go study at a library, and I found that rather cute.
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( 2.4 / 14 )Tuesday, July 17, 2007, 09:27 - General
Yesterday afternoon Qi-Qi came by the office to check it out and go to lunch. We capped off the food with some ping pong, and I'm pretty sure she enjoyed herself. After work I met up with her at Cosi, a coffee shop off Union Square, and we had dinner there (with me spilling water everywhere during it). Next was some shopping, with stops at a shoe store, Duane Reade, National Wholesale Liquidators (yeah), and then another shoe store. I finally got the sandals (for under $50) for which I've been pining in this heat, and we both loved the absurdity of NWL. We even got to pass by the building in which my future PhD office will be.[ add comment ] | permalink |
( 3 / 19 )Monday, July 16, 2007, 16:59 - General
I just got my New York driver's license in the mail. Somehow that's exciting.[ add comment ] | permalink |
( 2.7 / 18 )Sunday, July 15, 2007, 17:58 - General
Monday and Tuesday were somewhat uneventful. I don't really remember what I was up to, other than the obvious going to work and trying to focus on thesis programming in the evenings but not getting very far. I would like to adopt a strategy of getting "normal day-to-day" stuff like laundry and house chores done during the week and working full-time on my thesis during the weekends, but we'll see how that goes. I think I might actually need to work on it more than that to pull off getting it done by mid-September like I really want to.Wednesday Lewis and I had plans to go to this free talk by a Nobel Prize-winning Columbia neuroscience professor on human memory. It was one of a weekly series of free science talks in Park Slope (Brooklyn) under the auspices of the "Secret Science Society." I invited all the interns along and a couple said they wanted to come, so I had dinner with this intern Zhi (a PhD student in statistics at Duke) and met another guy Jeremie (a French master's student from Paris) and we rode the subway to Brooklyn together. There we discovered a huge line and after waiting for a while we got inside the building where I inspired everyone to buy a Chimay, which I was excited to see on tap until I was told it would set me back $9. I need to hold back when it comes to buying drinks in public places I think -- I'm no longer in Amsterdam. Anyway, we waited even more, were told we weren't going to get in, waited more, and finally had the doors closed on us when we were the next people who would have been given entry. Fire code etc. Lewis had shown up only 5 or so mins before this so he and I just went upstairs and hung out for a bit, watching people play indoor bochee ball. In fact the venue, called Union Hall, was quite cool even beyond the novelty of indoor bochee, but we left after a bit. We wandered looking for a G train stop, bought some pizza, and got into a conversation about how I'm no longer very inspired by a certain subset of the hippie community with which I once identified. There was this moment where I mentioned "hippies just bore me these days" and some guy walking his two dogs in Park Slope retorted "well, they must not have any good herb around then". I thought to myself that this was exactly the kind of thing that bores me -- a lame obsession with being a lazy bum, justified by some sort of "man in touch with nature" argument -- and we then got on the train.
Thursday was exciting as after work I went right over to Newark Airport to pick up Qi-Qi. Online before I left I was told she'd be early, and indeed they started circling Newark quite early, but they circled for like an hour so they ended up pretty late in the end. Thus I had time to finish rereading Ecce Homo before I saw her finally walking down the international arrival lane. This area is probably the worst-designed greeting area I've ever seen in any airport, and there was and must always be an enormous pile of people waiting and blocking the way for the people actually trying to exit the planes. In any case she was there with Stephanie, an American logic student who coincidentally was on the same flight, and both of them had boyfriends waiting to pick them up. We took the bus and subway and bus again to my place, and just spent the evening together before going to bed early. It's amazing how it feels - it's like we'd not spent more than a day apart, with the connection being just as strong as it was before I'd left. Needless to say we're very happy to see one another.
Friday morning Qi-Qi and I took a walk over to this Polish bakery in the morning to pick up some breakfast, and the Polish donuts we got were delicious. In the afternoon I heard that my dad was told, effective immediately, that his contract was over, so now he'll have plenty of time to fix up the house. :) My parents are even considering moving, which I wholeheartedly support. After work Qi-Qi said she was in the mood for pizza (a rarity I believe) so we walked over to a neighborhood pizza joint and when we ordered a cheese, they asked whether we wanted the fresh one that had just come out of the oven for delivery - nice. I don't feel any of the stodginess that I've felt in other big cities - so far people seem very talkative and friendly. We'll see whether that holds true. This was another early evening, with Qi-Qi falling asleep on the couch against my arm at around 10:30, not 30 minutes into the movie we'd started.
Saturday we got off to a slow start, eventually making a walk over to the grocery store on Driggs. We made baked potatoes for dinner, a nice typically American food which I've gotten Qi-Qi to like, maybe even more than I personally do. I also found a free desk in the Upper East Side on Craigslist so we got into Lewis's van at around 7:30 to drive over the Queensboro Bridge to pick it up. It was my first time driving the huge van as well as my first time driving in Manhattan as well as my first time driving with Qi-Qi in the car, so it was interesting. I was only a little nervous as I wound around onto the bridge, but driving along First Ave was actually very easy and seamless. Chicago traffic seemed much worse to me. The view from up there on the bridge was amazing - I think it will be a little while before I take that sort of thing about New York for granted. The guy helped me carry the desk down in pieces, and after waiting for him to hook us up with the forgotten screws etc. we were off back to Brooklyn. I just left the pieces in the van cuz I both couldn't find a close parking spot and didn't have a guy to help me carry them, and after a short rest we went off for a walk to give Lewis and Sonja (who was arriving for a four day visit) some alone time. We wandered over to McCarren Park and after getting some Dunkin' Donuts (I don't know why I keep going there) we sat and slowly ate while watching a large Hispanic extended family play soccer together, with little kids circling us on their bikes (replete with plastic bottles making noise against the turning tires) and old men reading water-stained books next to us. It was a very nice moment, just sitting there and basking in the urban night. We both love the city.
After this, we walked even further away up toward my June neighborhood, and after we got close enough I decided to just take us by my old place to show it to her. As we were standing there and just after she had mentioned that she wished she could go inside to see it, Rob's girlfriend Lauren came out of the open basement door to invite us in for a party in honor of Rob's birthday. We couldn't say no, so we went inside to hang out for a bit. There we met up with Dutch Erik and his wife, as well as one of their friends Henry. I really like the couple, very friendly and personable people, and they even suggested some vegetarian restaurants that I should try. This was also the first time someone's come up to me and said "hey, I saw you on Gawker" which was both cool and not. We left after saying happy birthday to Rob and started walking home, but by then Qi-Qi was getting rather tired from the long hike in heels so we caught the B48 bus from Manhattan to Morgan and went to sleep.
Today was another "adult weekend" day, with laundry and dishes being the main activities. I talked to my thesis advisor on Skype for about 15 minutes, but I didn't have that much to say because most of what I've been doing lately has been implementation rather than research. I also installed Kubuntu Feisty Fawn on Lewis's laptop as Edgy had been kind of unstable for him and I found out that the new KDE graphical networking tool actually works with a WPA protected network. I mean, I love the command line, but things like that keep making the "Linux Desktop Dream" closer to a reality for all those who want it to be realized. It was annoying to have to deal with X dying during installation (why do we need X-driven installs anyway?) and to re-figure out how to deal with wireless cards that require ndiswrapper. I wonder whether I can eventually put to use all this random sysadmin knowledge I've accumulated.
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( 3 / 18 )Monday, July 9, 2007, 19:42 - General
Saturday Lewis and I went out for lunch together to some local Polish dine-in but no-waitstaff eatery. He got potato pancakes which reminded me of my grandma's, and I got some cheese and potato dumplings which were pretty excellent, especially when covered in fried onions and sour cream (sour cream being something I've recently decided I should just like - what's next, mustard?). After this our plan was to walk to Manhattan Ave and get some Polish desserts, and along the way we happened to run into Matt who then invited us to a backyard barbecue not a few blocks away. Thus we went off and got our treats, received a text with the address which also requested some cheap beers, acquired some Budweiser (yuck, but at least I wasn't going to drink any of it), and made our way over to the place which was on Leonard. The apartment was amazing and huge and clean, with the typical "I just got extremely lucky" explanation as to how they found it. We were both stuffed from lunch so we didn't really eat or drink anything, just made some small talk with the people there for a couple hours and then left. I spent the evening working on my thesis and introducing Lewis to Trailer Park Boys, to which he quickly became an addict.Sunday was Lewis's birthday - now he's 26 like me. I spent the morning and early afternoon programming in the study, and then he talked me into going to this coffeeshop on Bedford (while I talked him into biking there over walking). It was a really nice place, with a motif that reminds me of the Cat, and we got a table outside and some iced coffees and spent a couple more hours on our laptops. Once his battery died it was time for a slice of pizza, and we biked home after which I worked for another hour while he did a running workout. I should get started with that, but I feel like I should get some shoes first. Finally it was time to head to the evening's highlight: a Tortoise show at Webster Hall. We got there around 7:45, and after a bit of debate decided to enter the venue even though the opening bands started at 8 and 8:45, with Tortoise not going on until 10. Their beer selection was poor, with me settling for a $7+tip Bass. If that wasn't bad enough, upstairs it was even worse, and when I got a response of 6 or so different mass-produced domestics as the list of beers they had on tap I made a hasty decision to get an $8 rail gin and tonic. I sure do miss 3 euro no tip Belgian abdij bieren. That was thus the final drink of the night for me, and by the time the two kinda boring opening bands were done my back was pretty sore (damn car accident). I found my attention drifting during their sets, and it made me think about how much musical experience has changed over the years. Now that we have recorded music, and even more recently totable music players, music has changed from an event which you experience to a background aspect of our lives. Thus I think we're less able to focus on it as the centerpiece of our attention than perhaps someone who saw an opera in Mozart's day (man I wish I'd decided to go to that performance of Don Giovanni in a castle outside Graz instead of heading to touristy Venice back in '05). The back pain was worth it though, as Tortoise put on a great show. I haven't seen a live band with two full drum sets since I think the King Crimson/Tool show at Red Rocks in Colorado (which was another amazing performance). Lewis seemed to enjoy them well enough too. The noise level wasn't even that bad, which was good since I'd forgotten my earplugs. On the way back to the L Lewis stopped for an omelet sandwich which looked delicious but I didn't try any. We capped off the night with some TPB and I fell asleep at 1 on my first night out in NY, even though I've been here a month (to the day). Thesis...
This morning I got a bit of a late start, waking up at 8, so I stayed at work until 7 before heading home. My wireless router arrived today (I love NewEgg, and internet shopping in the U.S. in general). Now it's time to start programming again...
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( 3.2 / 18 )Friday, July 6, 2007, 20:41 - General
Ugh, long day today, made especially so due to the unexpected Gawkering. I didn't even know the site existed, nor do I really care unless I exceed my bandwidth quota for the month this early. I just don't think my public diary is interesting enough for people to care much about it.Talked to my parents today while in Union Square. They're flying back home and have really enjoyed their trip.
Qi-Qi is for sure coming on Thursday and I can't wait.
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( 2.9 / 22 )Friday, July 6, 2007, 11:10 - General
I spent the 4th just working on stuff mostly. Lewis and I found a free desk on craigslist and drove up to Harlem over the Triborough Bridge to pick it up. It's pretty ok. We put it into the "study" for now.My room is pretty much situated except I'd like my own desk in there as well. I've done a fair amount more programming for my thesis in the last days, but 12 hours/day of C++ is kind of hellish. Can't wait to be done with that. I also noticed today that Associated Bank put a hold on my payroll check until Tuesday so my rent + security deposit check of $2700 bounced. I called the landlord to let him know and he was really nice about it and told me to give a new check to his daughter at her hair salon around the corner from my place. I'm really annoyed about that, but what can I do. Pay $50 in overdraft fees and postage I guess.
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( 3.1 / 27 )Thursday, July 5, 2007, 17:49 - General
Ik werd vanochtend op de trein klaar met mijn tweede vreemdtalige roman - Terug Naar Oegstgeest van Jan Wolkers. Nu moet ik nog een boekje kopen om me op de trein niet te vervelen.[ add comment ] | permalink |
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