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more or less recent stuff
Dec. 17th, 2001 12:37 amWhat a time to get sick, the fever-and-prostration phase aligned neatly with the two parties one day and the hyperactive dinner we threw the next. Now I'm crossing over into the less-disabling Strategic Mucus Reserve Buildup phase. So tonight was scheduled downtime for me, and gaming frenzy for D. She doesn't seem to have got it so far, knock plastic.
The dinner was fun. We need to do these more often, as we have too many friends to fit in the dining room. I think I will campaign for fewer courses and ones that take less last-minute frobbing, so we can put in more face time out of the kitchen. Anyway we did (see D's journal for translations to Japanese) miso soup (starting straight from shaved dried fish and a vast tract of kelp); cold buckwheat noodles with pathologically drippy sauce, I'm talking here like trying to get superfluid liquid helium to remain on your noodles while you configure them into your mouth; stir-fried noodles with chicken and random vegetables and special sauce; pork cutlets breadcrumbed with special Japanese breadcrumbs and fried, served on rice with Japanese curry sauce (which is closer to British food than British food is to Indian food, but not much); also non-green tea of East End Food Coöp designator 246, which I checked today as simply Earl Grey, resteeped with some 256, which I can remember is lapsang souchong because it for mnemonic purposes has a bite. We never got around to serving the traditional Japanese French vanilla ice cream.
After dinner we footled about with video games, demonstrated that the pink ParaPara pucks are not antipersonnel munitions as rochberg suspected them to be, watched people play D's snowboard game. I should learn to play that one so we can race.
Later, I suffered the gear-poseur's embarrassment of totally not remembering what was patched into where in my music setup since I rewired after the move practically six freakin' months ago, which means that I have to play with the stuff more, which means that I need to get A/D for the computer so I can have a recording device since the reel-to-reel seems to have been too venerable to have been moved.
The parties on Friday were fun. I met Elliot(t) somebody and Mike Horowitz: well, in both cases I'd met them before, but hadn't really. See, I don't even use Java, but I can still gripe about how braindead it is that it doesn't have any real generics.
At the Lodge party we mostly sat around and talked about stuff people had set on fire in college. This suited me, since I was pretty wiped by then. It should be noted that when we got there they were playing Dude, Where's My Car?.
My officemate's defense was on Thursday (the fifth-year one, not the first-year). It was solid work. They signed his card that afternoon, let him off scot-free on amendments to the dissertation, which is not common. I think the bottom line of the thesis was that he can get 10-20% faster FFTs and other transforms than with dynamic programming, which I gather is the current means of picking good transform factorizations. Interesting application of machine learning to DSP optimization.
Laura and Willie gave us (some of us were way too excited to wait to open it &smilie;, and I suppose it's not unambiguous what the target holiday date is anyway) a wonderful book about chocolate. It's got all about the history and current state of how cacao is grown, and the different varieties (it turns out to be something like robusta vs. arabica coffee, with crossbreeds and subbreeds) with pictures of the pods, and places where you can buy the equivalent of a single-vineyard Burgundy, only chocolate. Much more eye-opening than a recipe book, but it's got those too at the end.
Had a phone chat with my mom... got shaken down for a wish list, found out when everyone will be where over the holidays, and generally caught up on stuff.
Foof. I'm going to sleep.
The dinner was fun. We need to do these more often, as we have too many friends to fit in the dining room. I think I will campaign for fewer courses and ones that take less last-minute frobbing, so we can put in more face time out of the kitchen. Anyway we did (see D's journal for translations to Japanese) miso soup (starting straight from shaved dried fish and a vast tract of kelp); cold buckwheat noodles with pathologically drippy sauce, I'm talking here like trying to get superfluid liquid helium to remain on your noodles while you configure them into your mouth; stir-fried noodles with chicken and random vegetables and special sauce; pork cutlets breadcrumbed with special Japanese breadcrumbs and fried, served on rice with Japanese curry sauce (which is closer to British food than British food is to Indian food, but not much); also non-green tea of East End Food Coöp designator 246, which I checked today as simply Earl Grey, resteeped with some 256, which I can remember is lapsang souchong because it for mnemonic purposes has a bite. We never got around to serving the traditional Japanese French vanilla ice cream.
After dinner we footled about with video games, demonstrated that the pink ParaPara pucks are not antipersonnel munitions as rochberg suspected them to be, watched people play D's snowboard game. I should learn to play that one so we can race.
Later, I suffered the gear-poseur's embarrassment of totally not remembering what was patched into where in my music setup since I rewired after the move practically six freakin' months ago, which means that I have to play with the stuff more, which means that I need to get A/D for the computer so I can have a recording device since the reel-to-reel seems to have been too venerable to have been moved.
The parties on Friday were fun. I met Elliot(t) somebody and Mike Horowitz: well, in both cases I'd met them before, but hadn't really. See, I don't even use Java, but I can still gripe about how braindead it is that it doesn't have any real generics.
At the Lodge party we mostly sat around and talked about stuff people had set on fire in college. This suited me, since I was pretty wiped by then. It should be noted that when we got there they were playing Dude, Where's My Car?.
My officemate's defense was on Thursday (the fifth-year one, not the first-year). It was solid work. They signed his card that afternoon, let him off scot-free on amendments to the dissertation, which is not common. I think the bottom line of the thesis was that he can get 10-20% faster FFTs and other transforms than with dynamic programming, which I gather is the current means of picking good transform factorizations. Interesting application of machine learning to DSP optimization.
Laura and Willie gave us (some of us were way too excited to wait to open it &smilie;, and I suppose it's not unambiguous what the target holiday date is anyway) a wonderful book about chocolate. It's got all about the history and current state of how cacao is grown, and the different varieties (it turns out to be something like robusta vs. arabica coffee, with crossbreeds and subbreeds) with pictures of the pods, and places where you can buy the equivalent of a single-vineyard Burgundy, only chocolate. Much more eye-opening than a recipe book, but it's got those too at the end.
Had a phone chat with my mom... got shaken down for a wish list, found out when everyone will be where over the holidays, and generally caught up on stuff.
Foof. I'm going to sleep.
