Yankee Lost In The South

I'm surrounded by bamas. No, seriously: I'm in Huntsville, Alabama for three days for a users' workshop on a simulation code I use at work. And, all true stereotypes aside, there's nothing but bamas here. "Bama", of course, being what many Alabamans shorten their state's name to, and even often refer to themselves as. And also like any good self-imposed name, it's been picked up and run with by other groups in other regions to label someone who is a fool, or dumb, or goofy, or slow-witted. Well, OK, for all I know it's just a DC thing, but it's a "thing" no less, and to my mind, "bama" conjures up an image that all too well fits many of the people I'm running into down here.

The part of Huntsville where I am ain't no slouch technologically: the University Drive/Research Park area is home to the US Army's massive Redstone Arsenal, NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, the US Space & Rocket Center museum, the famous Space Camp, the DIA's Missile and Space Intelligence Center, and a large section of the ballistic missile defense industry outside of the metro DC area (thus explaining my time here).

Problem is, you'd have absolutely no idea that there are actually any mildly intelligent people here if you walked the streets and watched and listened to the people. At least, that's how I see it through my Yankee eyes. Listening to people here talk is an exercise in frustration: they either insist on adding lots of extra long-vowel syllables where they just aren't needed (the white folk) or they intentionally slur their speech so much that you're sometimes unsure if they're even speaking English (the black folk). It's also apparently a state law that you either drive a pickup truck or any vehicle with impossibly huge rims. Oh and, it seems you're definitely frowned upon if you can't shake all the cars around you with the bass coming from your car stereo, a phenomenon everyone everywhere is by now all too familiar with, but the difference here being that you must -- you simply must -- be blasting a rap song (sorry, but it ain't hip-hop, fellas) whose entire musical complexity involves no more than three notes on a cheap keyboard as well as some stupid chant for the chorus.

At the very least, I thought I could get some good barbeque while here. And that I did, although even that experience was marred when I asked for iced tea and the confused waitress replied, "You may-een suh-weight teigh?" Ugh ... yes -- sweet tea.

Well there's always book stores, right? I searched for the closest Borders online, and to my disappointment (but not surprise) the nearest one is more than 50 miles away. (OK, OK, there's a Barnes & Noble and a Books-a-Million just down the road, but I've always considered Borders the "classy" book joint, and I checked out B&N and it was deserted).

By far the creepiest experience I've had so far, though, was when I went to the local Waffle House tonight for breakfast-dinner. Craving waffles and eggs and bacon, and feeling that the Denny's right next door would not be a satisfying-enough outing, I headed for the Waffle House. When I got there, there was one waitress, one cook, and four patrons, and damn if it didn't look exactly like a scene from a Tales From The Crypt episode or a corny B-grade horror movie. As I sat down at the counter, I was trying desperately to remember if anything bad ever happened to the good-looking Yankee ain't-from-around-here guy.

Surveying the crowd, each one separately confirmed that I had in fact stepped into a Twilight Zone of sorts: the lone black guy, an older, skinny man apparently holding a low-key conversation with the counter in front of him; an overweight, over-made-up old southern belle with giant rings on each and every finger; a relatively normal-looking older white guy reading a Tom Clancy novel; and a second older white guy sitting in a corner, staring intensely out the window at what I could only assume where the aliens that were waiting for him to emerge in order to resume their enthusiastic orifice probing.

After I ordered my chocolate chip waffle, side of bacon, and side of eggs, I tried hard not to openly stare at this stifling collection of oddballs. Instead I focused on the bacon cooking, watching the fat sizzle up and away. As I watched my food being made, I was tempted to estimate exactly how much time I had left before the dude with the John Deere hat walked in with a shotgun and mowed everybody down, you know, just for livin'.

Soon my food was ready and I wolfed it down in about five minutes. It was OK, not great, but satisfied my craving. The bill was $9.43, but Calee, honey, you're a wreck, and you earned every penny of the $2.57 I tipped you, and nevermind that I just wanted to make it an even twelve for the minor novelty of exactly matching my lunch bill.

Thus ended my day "out", and I returned to my hotel room, to await another (but thankfully final) day in Huntsville tomorrow. I'm positively giddy with ek-sahht-mayent.

Vanilla-Flavored Milk Is The Devil's Drink

Whoever came up with the wholly unholy idea of vanilla-flavored milk ought to be hunted down and mercilessly tortured to death in public for unleashing this abominable creation upon an undeserving world.

Why do I feel such passionate hatred for a seemingly harmless consumer drink, you ask? Well, the explanation involves a completely reasonable and rational expectation of proper liquid accompaniment to a big chocolate chip cookie, and how that expectation was thoroughly trampled upon with the utmost offense. It goes like this:

Today I flew from Phoenix to Huntsville, with a layover in Dallas. On the flight out of Phoenix, I fell asleep and missed the drink service. When I woke up, I found myself extremely thirsty, possibly due to the loss of large amounts of drool that usually accompany my involuntarily open-mouthed style of sleeping on airplanes.

When I got off the plane, I quickly headed for the nearest food place, and found a Starbucks right near my gate (not only are they on every corner in every town in every city in every state in this country, they're also multiplying throughout airport terminals). I was in the mood for a big chocolate chip cookie, and Starbucks admittedly makes damn good ones - perfect size and perfect soft chewiness. As I looked around for a drink (I'm not a coffee drinker), among the few choices was milk. Oh nice! I thought. What better way to wash down a big chocolate chip cookie than some cold milk? It was even organic milk made by Horizon, to boot.

Paying for my cookie and milk, I hurried back to my gate, sat down and pulled off a corner of the cookie. Mmmm, nice and soft. After a few more bites, I opened the milk, inserted the straw, and took a long sip. Er ... what the ... ? Something ain't right; this is too sweet; did I get chocolate milk by mistake? How did I not notice that? Taking a close look at the box, I see, to my surprise and confusion, that this is in fact "vanilla-flavored milk". Come again? What the hell is vanilla-flavored milk? I take another sip; oh my god this is awful. It's as if somebody took a perfectly good cup of milk and added a sickeningly-sweet vanilla syrup to it. Just to make sure my mouth isn't deceiving me, another sip: oh yeah, there's no denying it, this is just terrible. It's so bad that we're now dangerously close to this milk ruining my entire cookie experience.

I put the milk down, continue to try to enjoy my cookie, and decide I'm not taking another sip until I'm done with the cookie and just need something quick to wash it down. Once the cookie's gone, I wince as I reach for the milk. Slowly raising it to my mouth, knowing that it's going to be bad, I quickly take a sip and swallow, so that the foul taste will spend as little time on my taste buds as possible. Again the syrupy-sweet taste assaults me, and at that point I decide to just throw the damn thing away rather than suffer through any more of it.

My chocolate chip cookie enjoyment had effectively been ruined.

As my plane was boarding, I didn't have time to get another drink, and to add insult to injury, my plane sat at the gate for a half hour due to bad weather before leaving, thus delaying the drink service even longer.

I just don't get why anyone would want vanilla-flavored milk. If you don't like the taste of either normal milk or chocolate milk, I'd suggest that maybe you shouldn't drink milk at all. At the very least, don't impose your disgusting made-up flavors onto an already perfectly acceptable product, and most definitely, do not, under any circumstances, ruin my chocolate cookie experience, or else When I Start Runnin' Things, there will be hell to pay.

Emptying Boxes

Well, the DC Project is real now. I sent resumes to two contacts in DC last week and received positive responses from both, and Ladan has begun selling furniture in Phoenix in preparation for our eventual move. I flew back to Arizona Thursday night and I'm here until Monday when I fly to Huntsville.

There's something palpably sad about seeing our apartment here with furniture missing. This part of our lives, when we were supposed to both live here in Phoenix for a year or two, is now over without ever having really happened.

I spent a good chunk of the day going through boxes of my accumulated stuff and trying to let go of as much of it as possible - so that I don't turn into one of those old packrats whose stuff eventually gets unloaded on antiques stores or simply trashed. Since graduating college, I've kept the vast majority of my textbooks, notes, exams, and projects. Even though I've known for years now that I would not be making a lifelong career out of aerospace engineering - I discovered too late that my love for aircraft didn't translate very well into love for the actual engineering underlying it all - I kept all my papers around for two reasons: one, just in case I ever somehow needed some of that information, and two, because I felt that after all that effort (and money) invested, throwing it all away would be like ... well, throwing it all away.

When we moved out of San Francisco, we paid a lot of money to have most of our possessions shipped to Phoenix. After the move, with more time on our hands, I went through all of it and realized that there were many boxes full of mostly papers that I just didn't need. One day I tossed out a stack of papers more than waist-high that had filled three heavy boxes. At that point I resolved to strive to significantly decrease the amount of random unnecessary stuff that I allowed myself to collect.

But until today, I hadn't had much impetus to actually start the trimming. Now that we're starting to think of the logistics of moving to DC, though, I was determined to rid myself of as much stuff as possible. I started with my college class notes and although it was painful, I threw out about 99% of it - hundreds, maybe thousands, of pages of printed and hand-written notes, class handouts, exams, and labs, dating back to around 1996. What a strange feeling it was to wade through these papers again; it was like fast-forwarding through five or six years of my college career, bringing back so many memories of those times. I can't believe I knew all those equations back then! It's amazing how little of what you learn actually gets used in the real world. Sure, it all lays the theoretical groundwork for doing the real thing, but man ... I could've learned the entirety of the engineering knowledge required for my current job in a single intensive semester.

Also getting the axe were about ten textbooks that I've now listed on Amazon; an entire box of spare computer parts: cables, connectors, fans, power cords, floppy and IDE cables, empty CD cases, and phone cords; a stack of old game manuals (about a third of my total collection, ones that I finally admitted to myself don't need to be held onto any longer); almost half of the papers in my apparently poorly-regulated Really Important Papers box; another box (the second) full of newly-emptied binders; a pile of old airplane pictures and posters that haven't been touched in years; and, in a stunning example of material liberation, all the many heavy wood panels that comprise my cludged-together computer desk/cockpit which has since been replaced by a single high desk from Ikea and a deck lounge chair.

Robert DeNiro's line in Heat advising to "never have anything in your life that you can't walk out on in 30 seconds" has always appealed to me, although I usually interpret it in a different context, in terms of material possessions. Those who know me would probably find that ironic, considering that I, for example, have held onto every computer game box that I've acquired since about 1998. But I like the idea of having few critical possessions - more accurately, I like the idea of being comfortable with having few critical possessions. It would seem wonderfully liberating to pack all my most important items into just a few boxes if I decided to say, move to another country tomorrow.

In reality, though, I know that things actually do mean a great deal to me, primarily music albums, books, and tangible links to the past like pictures. Their worth comes not from my mere ownership of them, but because of the enjoyment I derive from them over time. And while I feel that I'm getting better at not accumulating too many things, I've still got a long way to go to reach my ideal of just a few boxes' worth.

Antiques Ain't So Bad

When my friend B and I did a cross-country road trip last summer, we were amused by the incomprehensibly large number of "antiques" stores that adorn the otherwise barren stretches of our most boring-to-drive-through states. We never stopped to check any out, but I assumed they were full of items that could probably be best characterized as the accumulated trash of packrats whose death finally allowed it all to be cleared out of their basements.

While I couldn't care less about old silverware, furniture, or mugs, old printed volumes - books and magazines - have always caught my attention. Two years ago in San Francisco, a house around the corner from ours was having an estate sale, and I had a blast sifting through the mounds of pictures, pamphlets, and magazines. I felt triumphant when I paid two bucks for an immaculate hand-drawn map of San Francisco that was produced and given away free by a bank to its customers in I think 1942.

Last weekend when Ladan and I were in Bisbee, Arizona, we stopped into an antiques store in the small downtown area out of curiousity. Most of the store had the typical items that I imagined they would, but upstairs was a section for books, and I made a beeline for it. Once up there, I found a handful of books about airplanes, all previously owned by one man whose name he had written on the inside cover, as well as the year he'd acquired the book. I finally settled on two books: Strategic Air Command, published in 1961, and A History of the United States Air Force, 1907-1957, published in 1957. Aside from their worn covers, both books were in perfect condition. For $6.50, they were mine.

The books are classic Cold War texts: all black and white, very official looking. You'd almost think they were movie props or museum replicas until you realize they're real.

To me, the coolest thing about these books is that if I live to 2061 these books will be 104 and 100 years old, respectively, and will most likely chronicle a time that is radically different from the [future] present. At that time, looking through these books will shine a light on a distant past that very few living people will still remember, as opposed to what they are now, which is simply histories of places and events that our parents lived through when they were young.

Of course, unless I find a worthy successor to pass them onto, they might just end up back in the dusty book section of another antiques store.

Dude Was A Wizard!

Last week as I was returning from Atlanta to Phoenix, I had a layover in Dallas. While walking through the terminal, I passed a guy sitting on the ground, and out of the corner of my eye something that he was doing with his hands caught my attention. I turned to look at him and what I saw was so strange that I stopped dead in my tracks. Imagine that there was an invisible sphere in his lap; his hands were slowly moving around the outside of the sphere, and in the middle, there was a pen levitating.

Yes, levitating.

I was no more than three feet from the guy and there was clearly nothing visibly connecting his hands to the pen. The movement of his hands seemed to be coaxing the pen to stand upright, almost as if he was pushing and pulling its energy to keep it stable. After a few seconds he looked up at me and the awkwardness of it made me start walking again. Rounding a corner, I turned around and continued watching the guy.

Impossibly, nobody else seemed to notice for a good two or three minutes. Eventually, a few other people started staring too, but as this was just a normal guy in an airport terminal and not a street performer, rather than a crowd gathering around, people tried to watch while simultaneously trying to hide the fact that they were watching.

After a few more minutes, the guy put the pen away and pulled out his boarding pass. This he placed in one hand while holding the other hand above the first, slowly "lifting" the boarding pass up until it was standing vertically on his hand and then off of his hand, again just floating in front of him.

It was at this point that I finally remembered that my phone has a camera, and I quickly but stealthily snapped a few pics right as my plane was boarding. Because of the poor resolution and distance, the pictures came out predictably crappy, but you can still clearly see the boarding pass in his hands, and I can tell you from seeing it with my own eyes, it really was floating between his hands.

The guy got on my plane after me and passed me as he moved toward the back. In retrospect, I really wish I'd talked to him, as everyone I've told the story to is convinced that it was some sort of trick. I, too, would be sure it was a trick if I'd only heard the story and not actually seen it. But the fact that I walked within a few feet of this guy and got a very close look at the whole thing makes it much harder to brush off as an optical illusion or a cheap trick. I have no idea how he did it ... but I know what I saw.

Leaving Empty-Handed, Again

I've just returned from the AMD/Microsoft Tech Tour 2007, an annual PR event intended for system builders that showcases the latest from AMD and Microsoft. For the past three years, I've attended the tour's stop at AMD headquarters in Sunnyvale, since I work just a few minutes away. This tour got really popular when hardware geeks discovered that they were giving away prizes - processors, motherboards, video cards, software, etc. - at the end of each event by drawing attendees' names out of a hat. It is still laughably easy to sign up; you just fill out a form online, claim you're a system builder, and you're in.

Before the Tech Tour existed, AMD put on another event called the XP Performance tour. I attended two of these while still living in Maryland. At the first, Ladan came along and she was the first person to win a processor. Later that evening, I won a second processor. They were Athlon XP 2200s, clocked at 1.8GHz, and I built a new overclocked system around one of them and gave the other to a friend.

Since then, however, I've left each Tech Tour empty-handed aside from the free hot dog or hamburger dinner, and T-shirt and flash drive (512MB this time, not too shabby) they give to everyone at the end in exchange for handing in an event survey. Since just a few months ago I built an entirely new Intel system around the Core2Duo E6700 (the stock 2.6GHz chip is currently happily running at 3.6GHz) that Ladan acquired as a free "evaluation chip" through working for Intel, I wouldn't have had any use for much hardware. A few copies of Windows Vista Ultimate were given out though, and those I definitely could have used, if for nothing else than to continue my run of not having paid for a Microsoft operating system since getting Windows 98 on a Compaq pre-built I bought in 1999.

The first Tech Tour I attended was in 2005, again at AMD HQ. They set up a big tent on a grassy area next to a parking lot, and the first thing I noticed this year, as before, was the pleasant smell of freshly-cut grass. Also as usual, I first walked around and checked out the vendor booths before settling into a chair and watching the mostly canned presentations. In past years, the talks about current and upcoming processor designs fascinated me. This year that topic was reserved for the last presentation, and was a bit low-key compared to previous years, partly, I think, because of the near-universal critical acclaim for Intel's impressive Core2Duo. But the somewhat muted enthusiasm on their part for the processor lineup actually meshed well with my own. What a difference a year makes: last year at this time, Ladan had already accepted her position at Intel in Arizona, and the plan was that I would soon get a job there too. I was putting a lot of time into learning about processor architectures and design, and so I found the Tech Tour both directly relevant and excitingly motivating.

As it turned out, as the Intel hiring freeze dragged on, we abandoned our plans to move permanently to Arizona. I stopped looking for jobs out there and we set our sights on DC. And that's where we are now. For me, the world of processors is now firmly relegated to a personal interest, rather than a potential career-change path. Additionally, it feels weird knowing that this will be my last Tech Tour in Sunnyvale. Sure, I'll attend the DC event next year, but it just won't be the same. I'm going to miss that tent with its freshly-cut grass.

The Month of May

It's been a (typically) busy week. Last Wednesday I flew to Atlanta to attend a day-and-a-half class for work. Friday night I flew to Phoenix, then Saturday morning Ladan and I drove to Bisbee, a small former mining town hidden in a canyon just a few miles north of the Mexico border. We spent the night there, then came back on Sunday. On the drive down there, we checked out the tiny town of Tombstone, home of the famous gunfight at O.K. Corral in 1881, and subject of the movie of the same name.

This morning, I fly back to San Jose (as usual, I'm loving the extremely rare free wireless that Sky Harbor provides). Tuesday night I'll hopefully be at AMD's Tech Tour in Sunnyvale, an event I always look forward to, although this year I'll need to skip my macroeconomics class in order to attend. Wednesday night I have microeconomics; Thursday night I fly back to Phoenix for the weekend. The following Monday, I fly from Phoenix to Huntsville, Alabama, to attend a 3-day class through Thursday. That night, I fly back to San Jose. The next day, Friday, Bharath comes up for the weekend. Two days after he leaves, I have my macroeconomics and then microeconomics final exams.

That takes me to May 23. In the first week of June, Ladan probably will have a work trip to Japan for a week. If she does, she may go about a week early - the last week of May - so that I can tag along and we can explore the country together.

So basically, I've got pretty much all my days planned right up through the first week of June. And somewhere in there, I need to find time to continue moving on The DC Project.

Although in some sense I am a homebody, and very much enjoy so-called downtime periodically, I'm not bothered by this continuing hectic schedule. I'm wracking up the frequent flyer miles, and essentially got two free one-way tickets to Phoenix because of my conveniently overlapping work trips.

But still, every time I leave here, I wonder at how much easier and just frankly better things would have been had I been able to get a job with Intel last year soon after Ladan moved here. All this time and money and frustration that has gone into living apart would have been saved. Although I love the Bay Area and it's weather, living in Phoenix wouldn't have been so bad. I can't argue with mid-60's at 4:30AM and 11PM. And although the area lacks any sort of real city life, it is relatively close to the Grand Canyon, Sedona, San Diego, Los Angeles, etc., which is where most of our trips have been to.

It's both easy and tough to look forward to DC. Easy because we'll finally be back together after more than a year apart, easy because of not having to pay for two separate sets of expenses, easy because we'll be living in a city and working towards entering careers that we both feel excited about. But tough because, man, as I've said so many times, weather is just so damn important to my mood. Consider that I haven't woken up to uncomfortably cold temperatures even once since leaving San Francisco almost a year ago. And also tough because DC will be so damn expensive relative to where we are now. In that regard I'm caught in a Catch-22: I'm moving to DC so that I get escape the defense industry, but in order to live in DC, I need to stay in the defense industry in order to make enough money to live there. As a result, at this point I'm leaning toward staying in the same line of work as long as I can find a company that will pay for school.

Regarding the weather, though, I have to say that I absolutely loved the humidity of Atlanta. I hadn't felt real humidity in many months; Phoenix is of course bone-dry, and the Bay Area's pretty dry too. As soon as I stepped off the plane in Atlanta, and felt the air envelope me, I was in heaven. I'm one of the extremely rare freaks who really loves humidity. I tried to spend as much time as possible outside while I was there, just to soak in the moisture. And it's funny: whereas had I still been living in Maryland I would have felt how relatively different Atlanta was from the DC area, I instead simply noticed how East Coast mid-atlantic it felt. Compared to the West Coast, all I noticed was that I was clearly back in the East. Had I not known better, I might've even thought it was Maryland. And happily for me, I really liked it and didn't miss California at all.