Picking up fresh strawberries

Enjoying a hot chocolate and bagel in Santa Cruz

Tippy and I stayed over last night in Santa Cruz. Was a nice drive from San Jose. I found it to be a typical coastal city: very laid back, hippies-abound, and every street named after a part of the ocean.

Spent most of the night driving around and figuring out the city (we were relying on internet-based maps). Found a nice Italian restaurant (ordered a white zinfandel) and gorged on some simple pastas. Tippy got the eggplant parmesan (as usual).

On our way back we picked up some fresh strawberries at a farm. Very sweet and lucious indeed. Now we’re pretty tired.. sitting on a bed and blogging as usual.

On a side note, I never understood why people are hired to twirl signs on the side of a road to advertise for businesses. Do people really get lured to by mattresses if a scruffy looking guy is idiotically waving a bold printed sign exclaiming the benefits of king sized beds? And why don’t they just use a machine to wave around the sign? I guess part of the reason is that it incites such conversations as this that point to the boneheaded nature of the whole thing.

PBS is doing a special on the state of the music industry. An interesting interview with David Crosby sheds some light on the issue of popular music. I hold many of the same opinions: popular music is more about the look than the music.

I used to be quite elitist when it came to music. I proclaimed certain bands to be trash, while uplifting others. Before, my excuses were based upon their music, and how certain bands “keep it real” and make more interesting music. Now, I’ve come to the conclusion that this isn’t the fundamental issue. The issue with popular bands is that they’ve been filtered by the music industry. The industry wants beautiful people who are eye candy to the camera. It’s no longer based on musical abilities (although, there are a few gems out there.. Norah Jones was mentioned in the article). As soon as the performance measure is not based on music, the whole system becomes “fake”, as many people would would say.

I always railed on the artist’s not being original and being “too popular sounding” (whatever that means). But now I must retract this. How can they possibly be original with the music industry pressuring their jobs? If they were original, then they would be forever banished into the indie universe. These people are playing the game, and yes, they have sacrificed the music to do this (with those few exceptions noted).

The Mountain View public library. I spend most of my days here using the internet connection.

We’ve decided to recarpet our new apartment (with no help from the owners! Cheapskates!) So we went to the apartment and measured each room. We forgot the tape measure, so I layed down and measured multiples of myself along the wall (using 5’6″ as my height). But eventually the property managers came by with a tape measure (still, our measurements were close to correct).

Tippy also wants to paint the apartment. With all this effort, the lighting had better be good enough to see all the changes we’re going to make. Time to spend some time at Home Depot….

Still on the job hunt. I’ve applied to a wide array of jobs: tutoring, web design, engineering, graphic design, and various on campus jobs. It’s still a wonder how we got our credit check through to get the apartment.

Stanford’s offering me 100mb of webspace. This is in stark contrast to Cornell’s 15mb. Loyalty to my undergrad you say? Ha.. Stanford here I come. My redirection is still http://cali.webhop.net/, but my true url is now http://www.stanford.edu/~jjyu/.

I’ve been driving up and down from San Jose to Mountainview everyday. I drop Tippy off at work, and I come home to use the internet to look for jobs. This is about a twenty minute one way trip. Well, I figure it was time to stop wasting gas (prices are insanely high here!) and utilize a computer at the library. So I checked in with the Mountainview Public Library and found their services to be more than sufficient. It’s actually a bit weird seeing how advanced libraries are nowadays, since I haven’t set foot on a public library since more than four years ago. There’s plenty of internet enabled computers around here to go around.

Some books I’ve started reading: The Simpsons and Philosophy and An Introduction Course to Fuzzy Logic. I figure I need to know a bit about fuzzy logic to help me understand more about pattern matching and neural networks.

Still looking for a job. Waiting on the web job position to call me back. Hopefully I get it.