Japanese class

Today I registered for the 5&6 level Japanese class. I’m thinking about taking the level 4 JLPT test in December. Supposedly I will be ready for it by the time I finish my next quarter’s class, but it still looks really hard…

The five stages of grief…

Yesterday there was a death at the office place… the air conditioner that is. At 9:15pm on Monday, July 21, 2008 our conditioner suddenly and unexpectedly passed away. My office mate (who arrived shortly after) and I proceeded through the five stages of grief–a model advocated by Kuebler-Ross (some guy I just found on the internet). Here are some actual quotes from last nights surreal experience:

Denial: “Oh sh*t!!! This can’t be happening!!”… “I know it just stopped abruptly, but just maybe if I start flipping all these switches and turning all these knobs…”

Anger: “Oh sh*t!!! We are SO screwed!”… “it’s your fault because YOU touched it last!”… “no, it’s your fault for not tending it while I was gone!!”

Bargaining: “I’ll do ANYTHING!!! Just WORK damn you!!!”

Depression: “What are we going to do!”… “There is no point in coming to work anymore…”

Acceptance: “It will be OK”…. “shall we place bets on how long it will take someone to fix this thing?”… “I bet it will be fixed by the end of summer–probably when we no longer will need it.”

Oh crap… I think I just slipped back into stage one…. WE ARE SO SCREWED!!!!!!

Another picture

I forgot to post this picture from Jamestown–the first English speaking permanent settlement in North America.

I’m back!

Finally! I’m back home now. So let me now summarize some of the highlights of my trip to Williamsburg. As you know, we drove down last Sunday and stopped in Baltimore for dinner. We went to a well known crab house called Obricky’s. Here is a picture of me drinking my “Crabby Mary”.

Notice the Old Bay frosting on my drink? Yum…. We unfortunately missed the conference reception because of this excursion, but I thought it was well worth it.

As you also know, I stayed in the dorms, which was a pretty disgusting experience for a number reasons–starting with the fact that I don’t think the towels I was given were clean. Also, my pillow was gross and so I didn’t use it, I don’t think the sink in my room was clean–there were other people’s hair in it (yes, we did at least have sinks in our rooms), and finally I am convinced that the showers were not cleaned once since I got there (as indicated by somebody’s booger that kept staring at me from the shower wall each day). Here is a picture of the bed I slept in–it was not quite a cot, but it was equally as uncomfortable in my opinion.

And the bar a kept banging my head against when getting in and out of bed. I would love to get my hands on the jack-*ss who designed this bed….

The conference was enjoyable, but long. I met some new people, including a nice, but extremely quite Japanese girl who was kind enough to help me with my homework (I started a new book in class, and some of the words that I don’t understand are not in the back of the book). In the evenings, we drank a lot since there wasn’t anything else to do in Williamsburg. It is a nice place, but I would never go to school here because there really is nothing to do and only a handful of (pricey) restaurants.

Near the end of the conference, the graduate students (in our research group) and I went to somebody’s house for more blue crab. There was actually maybe 10 or so people who came–mostly Chinese (so I didn’t understand most of the conversations). Someone bought 80 live blue crab for $40 from some fishermen that day. Here is a picture of the crab before their inevitable deaths,

the crab getting eaten,

and finally, the aftermath.

It was really good.

Yesterday we headed home, but first made a stop in Ocean City. Ocean City was OK, but there were not very many hot chicks around. Just a lot of leather-skinned old people… who clearly have been in the sun too long.
Here is a picture of me on the beach.

Before leaving, we stopped at Phillips all you can eat seafood buffet. I ate 7 whole snow crabs, 6 whole blue crabs, 7 crawdads, two plated of jambalaya, 1 oyster and 3 Guinness’s. It was OK, but not great. Definitely no where near as good as the crab dinner we had the previous day. But then again, what can you expect from an all-you-can-eat seafood joint, right? We arrived back home at 3am.

My talk

Today I gave my Lattice 2008 talk in beautiful Willimsburg, Virginia. The talk went well–considering I went toe to toe with my competitors. Actually, they seemed pretty cool about everything, although I think I caught them a little by surprise.

OK–now for my rant. Earlier today a certain person who shall remained unnamed (unrelated to the last person I ranted about) gave a plenary talk today which basically described all the ideas in my thesis. Did I get any citation? NO!!!! I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt–surely he must not have known about my work. Oh wait–he attended my talk two years ago and even stayed after to discuss my research! Pretty slimy, huh?

In Virginia

Well, I’m in Virginia for a conference. The registration fee for this one was pretty high, so I had to do everything I could to save money. So I carpooled with the grad students instead of flying. That was not so bad. We stopped at a crab house in Baltimore which was really good. But when we got to our destination, my mood suddenly changed. Because of the money situation, I have to stay in the shit hole dorms here. It’s not quite as expensive as the hotel, but still expensive for what it is…. $300 for six nights. So what does this get you? A f*cking cot, a desk and a couple of towels. No f*cking soap. No f*cking shampoo. No f*cking iron to iron my clothes. No f*cking hangers. No f*ing anything. I’m going to get out of this shit hole as fast as I can. I don’t care if I miss part of this conference, frankly (except my talk which is thankfully in Monday). Maybe I’ll catch a train back to NYC on Thursday or Friday. I hate this f*cking bullshit.

I took a picture of my room; I’ll post it when I get back.

ビレッジよこちょはとてもおいしいですよ！

So I went out to eat for the first time in about two weeks. I went with my office mate to a place called Village Yokocho in East Village. This was the place I took my brother when he came to visit for a day a while ago. They make the most delicious udon noodle soup with chicken, shrimp, an egg, scallion and mushrooms. It is the best $7 one can spend. We also got a pitcher of beer, which was pretty cheap by New York standards… only $12!

Ummm…. what else is new… I’m getting prepared to go to Virginia for a week for a conference. I’m not really looking forward to it, considering I’ll be staying in dorms and also will have to miss two Japanese classes. I’ll have to practice my skills on some Japanese physicists to make up for that, I think.

Why am I not surprised?

So today I discovered on the archive that a former colleague of mine has posted a paper (arXiv:0807.0834) on the numerical simulation of graphene. This was the guy who I started working on the same project with over a year ago but later realized that I was the one doing all the work, while he was apparently busy with other priorities. I eventually told him off and decided to pursue other interests. It looks like he decided to continue the project where I left it. That’s cool. I don’t mind at all, actually. What does piss me off, however, is that this guy didn’t even have the courtesy to add an acknowledgement in his paper for my early role in the project. That’s pretty classless.

Pan fried bagel, anyone?

So the title of this post requires a bit of explanation. This weekend I decided to make my own “bagel and two eggs with cheese” rather than buy it for $2.79 from my local deli. The only problem was that I don’t have a toaster to toast my bagel. Now any sensible person would simply put the bagel in the oven on broil, right? Well… I’m not very sensible I guess because I tried to pan fry my bagel with the tiniest coating of oil. This was a HUGE mistake. I basically ruined my pan. So laugh it up at my expense. Please, I insist! I deserve it.

So now that you’ve had a good laugh, let me tell you about what happened today. I went to きのくにや to get some origami paper (I’ve been inspired to take is up again, and don’t want to waste the good stuff I got from J+M) and then I went to the little cafe upstairs to write a letter to someone and also eve’s drop on people as they speak in Japanese (I could actually understand a few words, believe it or not). After that I went to the park nearby and made my weekly call to Grandma. While I was talking to Grandma, who do I see walking down the path? A fellow classmate from the UW physics, Dr. Andy O’Bannon! I thought running into a fellow particle theorist in my Japanese class was unusual… what are the chances of randomly meeting a fellow particle theorist and someone I know from the UW in the 12th the largest city in the world?!?!?!?!?! Anyway, he seems to be doing well. He’s off to Munich to start a postdoc and stopped here before heading over there.

Have you ever…

…reached in your pocket and discovered you had a $20 bill in there? Well, that didn’t quite happen to me. Something better did. I just realized I was never reimbursed for my flight to NYC when I first moved here. I completely forgot about it. I’m sure the fact that I’m going to claim it 10 months after the fact won’t be much of an issue…. we shall see on Monday!