4th of July Weekend

The festivities jumped to an early start with my trip to the Academy of Sciences Thursday night.  I've been longing to visit every since they reopened and launched their campaign to portray the museum as a hip, revolutionary place.  I went with CPC people to attend the weekly Nightlife event, where the musuem opens from 6-10pm on Thursday, brings in a DJ, clears out a dance floor, serves drinks, and reserves admission to those 21 or older.  I didn't find any of the exhibits particularly special, but the whole atmosphere was fun.  I saw quite a few familiar faces, including a bunch of people from Saratoga High.  The most unique feature of the museum was probably the "living roof", a landscape of rolling green hills that bears an eerie resemblance to Teletubby Land.

I had the day off on Friday, so I decided to finally commence my half-marathon training.  After running only 2.5 miles, I was exhausted (and was sore for the ensuing 2 days).  In my defense though, I sprinted two 100m segments in an attempt to preserve my fast twitch muscles.  If I hope to finish the 13 miles, I'm really going to have to start running more.

Saturday, July 4th, I spent the entire day at home playing board games.  First, we played a few games of Scrabble, then Pictionary, then Nerts, and we capped off the evening by watching one of my favorite movies, Hero.  I hope my brother's interest in Chinese martial arts stories was piqued after watching this movie; I further encouraged it by reenacting scenes from the movie with him.  Ideally, after he gains interest, he may then start picking up those Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon type books and in so doing improve his Chinese.  This was the first time in years that we didn't go out to watch fireworks, but it was worth it.

Sunday, after church, the "cycling club" folks dropped by my house and kidnapped me.  We then proceeded to drop by various friends' homes.  On our bikes, the neighborhood seemed to shrink to a college-era size, where everyone was readily reachable.  That was a great feeling.

Mike and Sam's Engagement

On Saturday, I arrived in Berkeley several hours before the scheduled surprise party for Mike and Sam, hoping to catch up with friends prior to the main event.  To my disappointment, it seemed that most of the people were out watching Transformers or busy with something else.  I thought about just finding a shaded spot and napping the time away, but the idea of driving all the way to Berkeley only to use up my time napping seemed unacceptable, especially since I passed up on The Proposal to come up early (shucks).  Instead, I opted for some Berkeley culture immersion by playing basketball in People's Park.

As a side note, I experienced a basketball renaissance this past Friday.  I was at the Oracle gym Friday afternoon, and some time between the 2nd and 3rd game, something clicked.  I started shooting extremely well, nailing like 6 shots in a row from all over the floor, and around 10 out of 11.  I seriously felt like I couldn't miss during that stretch.  I'd glance left and right, throw up a shot, and magically it'd go in every time!  The one other time in my life I felt like this was when I was shooting free throws with Pika and made 13 in a row.

Ever since that happened, I've been wanting to go play again to see if that accuracy was merely a fluke.  I struggled with the idea only because I knew I'd sweat and become a noisome presence at the party, but I decided that risking the others' discomfort was a chance I was willing to take (If you were there and smelled feet, I'll confess and apologize for it ).  Surprisingly, my shot was still continuing to fall!!  Despite the merciless triple rim at People's Park, I swished my first 5 or so shots and continued with a respectable percentage thereafter.  I felt like I could earn the respect of any ghetto hoopster around.  While I was strutting around like the alpha male of People's Park, this guy with blood streaming from his face and smeared across his bare chest walked across the court, and I woke from my reverie with the realization that it'd take more than a jump shot to fit in with this crowd.

Various people joined me in shooting around over the course of the afternoon.  I met a guy named Christian and two social workers named John and Wayne.  These two were previous addicts that are now clean and helping to educate the homeless guys in People's Park.  John, presumably a Native American, was pretty raw offensively, but Wayne, the 250 lb. black guy, was actually really good.  We played 3 games of 21 with constant bantering and trash talking and had a lot of fun.  Later, as I walked along Telegraph, I saw Christian again, and we talked some more.  He even asked if I had a myspace.

Despite being at Berkeley for 4 years, I don't think I had as many such encounters with strangers as I did in one short afternoon on this torrid summer day.  When I'm always hurrying past homeless guys, going from point A to point B, I don't have time to register their needs.  It's not until I slowed down, made myself available, listened to one man's story, that I began to feel some compassion.  I've been praying that God would make me more loving, but I also realized that, contrary to Hollywood's depiction, love isn't just an emotion that wells up spontaneously and overwhelms one's senses.  Love is simply a commitment to care.

Enough about my love story.  I met up with a few others at Steph Chen's apartment to wait for the homecoming of the happy couple.  After surprising them, we pried story after story from them and watched the momentous facebook relationship status change take place live.  Steven soon arrived with the rest of the Crossroaders, whereupon Mike and Sam were forced to share their stories again.  It's always great to partake in others' happiness.

FAQs

Q. What are you doing this summer?
A.  The question seems to imply that the summer season is different from any other.  Unfortunately, the days of summer breaks are over.  The only benefit that summer brings is prolonged hours of sunlight.  This is not something to be discounted, however, because going home after sunset is indescribably and inexplicably depressing.

Q.  What happened to you?  You're fat.
A.  Darn, you noticed.  On average, I only exercise about 3 hours a week now, and half of that is accumulated from walks to the cafeteria.  Also, this past Saturday, I had Fuji Sushi buffet in Davis for lunch, then returned to Berkeley for all-you-can-eat hot pot that evening.  I went to Davis for Ricky's graduation and Berkeley to see John.

Q.  You used to spend every moment each evening on AIM and gchat hoping to escape your loneliness;  how come you've been less visible lately?
A.  Megaman X: Command Mission for Gamecube.  I've b....excuse me while I go destroy some Mavericks.

Q.  How's the jump training going?
A.  It's stalling.  I do leg exercises about once a week.  I'm afraid to convert all my endurance muscle fibers into the fast twitch ones by jumping too much because then I'll die during the SF half marathon.  I also don't want to train for endurance and end up with an 8 inch vertical, so I'm not really training for the marathon either.    I have no dearth of excuses for my laziness.

Helpless

This past week has been hellacious.  Bug after bug keeps popping up regarding our product's help system, the area which I have somehow assumed complete responsibility over during the course of the past 6 months.  It's not just the sheer quantity of bugs that's overwhelming me;  it's also the fact that our product is being released in a matter of weeks.  How embarrassing would it be if our product has to delay shipment to wait for my fix, or if a customer pops open the help window to find a blank screen?!  At this point, any code fixes will require approval from some high level executive, the senior vp I believe.  I have been praying that I can be an effective witness for God in the workplace, but this wasn't how I envisioned my relationship with the execs would begin.

Some people are probably eager to point out that my ownership of this area could be the very reason why it's so buggy.  Maybe.  I don't think so though.  All of my code was working fine until they asked me to make a big change at the last second.  It's not my fault we haven't had as much time to test this as the other features.  It's not my fault the help system requires a ton of memory and so is often the first thing to fail.  It's not my fault!  I really need that assurance right now.  If my boss were to tell me this, I think it'd play out very much like the climactic moment between Robin Williams and Matt Damon in Goodwill Hunting, where I melt into a soppy mess of tears and snot.  Except my boss would only have to say it once.

One particular bug that's been haunting me has been a nightmare.  It's nondeterministic, so we don't know how to reproduce it consistently.  Even if we fix it, we wouldn't know if it's fixed, or if it just hasn't decided to rear it's bugly head yet.  This type of bug ranks as the #2 worst class of bugs, with the bugs assigned to Alvin Chyan as the obvious winner for worst bugs ever.  What's worse, in order to gather more information about it, I'd need to pull some strings and then restart the product for my changes to take effect.  But once restarted, the bug goes away, so I have to wait for it to show up again.  Today, I was finally able to get the bug to reproduce in an environment where I had all the debugging tools setup, so I didn't have to restart the product again.  Now I can assign it to someone else to look at.  No more waiting in my cube until the QA team in China comes to work so I can correspond with them.  Thank goodness.

Despite all these tragedies, I still feel like I've been really blessed at work.  I keep finding myself getting lucky.  For instance, I get assigned a bug that's totally not in my domain.  I spend time looking at it, but I'm relatively stress-free because I feel like I'm doing someone else a favor.  A week or so later, I find that the information I learned from triaging that other bug helps immensely for my own task.  Another example was that something tangential would come up that would remind me of a fix I needed to make.  I almost forgot to include the translated help documents with our product, and it was just a small subset of the help files that might have been overlooked by the testers otherwise.

In conclusion, it's not my fault.  And I'm actually not as emo as I may sound.  Please don't pity me haha.

6/2

The Memorial Day vacation couldn't squeeze a post out of me.  This past lonely weekend in the apartment didn't stir me to action.  Not even the fear of sleeping with a vengeful, fugitive spider under my bed last night was motivation enough to stay up and blog while waiting for the spider to reappear.  Today, the decease of our apartment Internet finally gave me the occasion to draft an offline summation of recent happenings.

Memorial Day weekend - Jed's birthday party was held at Arguello Park in San Carlos, so I came back from Saratoga on Sunday to attend.  The highlight was probably witnessing his Indian coworker try meat for the first time in his life.  I'm not sure if I'm happy that he has come to know the glorious wonders of meat, or if there's just some perverse pleasure in seeing somebody violate his principles.  Now I can understand why my friends got such a thrill out of hearing me swear.  It was good meat, so hopefully that coworker will consider continuing the carnivorous habit.  It got very cold very fast, so we later moved indoors.  We played smash and mafia, and at the very end, nerts.  Turns out a bunch of us were aching to play nerts, but were just hesitant to mention it thinking no one else knew how to play.  That was uber fun.

This past weekend, I went to SF with Impact people to volunteer at CityTeam.  We prepared bag lunches and distributed them at a residential hotel.  This was certainly no Plaza Hotel.  The residents were mostly low or no income people, many of which were handicapped.  Most people there eagerly accepted the lunches we brought; many of those not there were probably waiting for the meal distribution at the adjoining church.  It was an eye-opening experience.  The evening was spent in the worst possible way.  I napped for 2 hours, then played hours of Mega Man interspersed with a cumulative hour or so of GRE studying.  I ended up sleeping at 3am.

On Sunday, I went to CPC and heard yet another great sermon on giving.  "You can give w/o loving but you can't love w/o giving."  A prime example: For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son...Afterwards, I went to Junichi's for lunch consisting of soba and pot stickers.  When I got home, I had a massive headache.  I suspect it was due to sleep deprivation from the night before.  I tried numbing the pain with some sake, but I just ended up being red and itchy, all the while suffering from the massive headache.