This is the view from our living room window. It’s a bit gray this morning (as every morning is in SF). Also, I took a shot of the full moon–it’s the lowest in 18 years.

We finally finished moving into our new place in San Francisco. The apartment is much smaller, but a lot more functional. Yes, we painted the walls again.

Features of the apartment:

• Large, bright windows.
• Great views of the city (9th floor).
• Great neighborhood (pacific heights).
• Last, but not least, I get to hear the city sounds while I’m falling asleep–a fantasy of mine for a while.

Don’t ask me about the cow-shaped hand vacuum cleaner. That will have to wait for another post.

Whenever I meet someone, they always ask me if I go by Jim. I’ve never liked the name Jim, nor have I ever wanted to be called Jim. I find the name a bit too glib. But people like to translate James as Jim for some reason. It’s as if it’s an automatic conversion for them.

But no!

I don’t want to be called Jim. I politely say,”No, I go by James.” It’s at this point where I detect a hint of sadness over the person’s face, as if calling me James is such a traumatic loss for them. I even feel a little guilty. Is this at all normal?

On top of this, my last name is Yu. Don’t even get me started on that.

It’s now official, the job hunt is over. I’m going start working for Dolby this June. Yes, I’m very excited.

I’ll be working as a design engineer on a fast moving team within the company. I know one thing for sure: there’s going to be a lot of learning. Dolby, which recently went public, is at the top of its game right now, and is expanding rapidly. The particular team I will be working on is a central and pivotal audio design team. I’ll be exposed to many elements of real world audio engineering; it’s going to be a rocking time.

Tippy is, of course, ecstatic as well.

We’ll probably be moving to San Francisco in the near future. I’ll be finishing my MS at Stanford this June, and things will be moving fast from there.

It’s a bit weird to finally know where I’m headed after college. Tippy keeps saying that this is the moment where I actually “grow up” and get an actual full time job. I, on the other hand, see it as a natural progression–not as much a sudden jarring change.

In any case, the city is going to be fun, and we’re going to live it up as much as possible. Now, which district should I live in? Anyone got any suggestions?

I have a rather primitive cell phone compared to other technophiles. It’s a slim Nokia with a black and white screen–a hand-me-down from Tippy’s brother. I have no complaints; the phone itself allows me to place calls, and that’s all I ever need from it. But once in a while when I’m bored, I’ll play some old school games on my cell. One of my favorites is Snake. I originally knew this game back in the old Basic programming days as “Nibbles”.

The premise is simple: you navigate a snake around the playing field, eating the little pellets. Each pellet makes your snake longer. You die if the snake ever touches the walls or itself (if this were true in real life, the snake population would be devastated). It’s a fun little game that takes my attention away from boring situations. This is all well and good, except for one problem. The high score attained by Tippy’s brother was insanely high at around 800. Ever since getting the phone, this had annoyed me. Let’s just say it’s a bit of an ego deflator to have a high score on your phone that wasn’t achieved by yourself.

I was on a quest to defeat this score.

This proved to be quite difficult. At first, I tried playing at the highest possible level (9), which means the snake moves really fast, but each pellet provides more points. Therefore, I could theoretically attain more points in less time. But I found that the snake moved much too fast to navigate safely when the snake is long. I decided to lower the level to 6 and enjoy higher finger tapping precision at a cost of lower points per pellet.

Next, I calculated how long the snake would have to be before I reached the high score. I concluded that the snake would take up most of the playing field. I realized that I needed a plan: I couldn’t simply arbitrarily navigate my snake at such long lengths since I could easily trap myself. I decided to consistently wrap my snake from the bottom up in a weaving pattern that didn’t leave any empty spaces behind the snake. At long snake lengths, I preceded in this weaving fashion from bottom to top, and continuing by coming back down.

This was a successful strategy. But still, it required a level of concentration that is very intense. One wrong tap of the button and my snake would vanquish itself. There was no room for error since I wrapped my snake as tightly as possible. Needless to say, I spent many trials doing this, and failed.

Yesterday, the long quest was finally over. I was in the zone–my fingers were tapping in a good rhythm. I immediately knew that I had finally surpassed the 800 mark, but I continued. The snake grew ludicrously long, spanning almost the entire screen. I thought I would actually get to the point where I had no other space for my snake to travel into. However, I made a wrong crucial move near the end. But it didn’t matter; I broke the high score with 1036!

After a few seconds of euphoria, my heart immediately sank. I knew that defeating this score marked the end of my snake trials. I really did enjoy the insane finger frolicking, vexed by the high score.

My hair is long now. It hasn’t been this long since high school.

It’s at that awkward length where it’s just long enough to annoy my ears and side of my face, but not long enough to sweep back very easily. Also, my hair doesn’t instant dry after showers: oh bother.

I think it might be wise to trim it back before interviews start. But then again, if they really wanted me, shouldn’t they not care about my appearance? Sure, if I was going to work in a customer relations type of position, then I could understand the focus on appearance. But, for the hardcore engineering positions I’ll be applying to, I wouldn’t be suprised if a scruffy look would put me at an advantage. “Hmm, he looks rather unkempt and disheveled. That must mean he works really hard in the lab all day! Let’s hire him…”

Or, it might just be a disaster. Better reach for the shaver soon. Either that or grow it long enough to be in a ponytail. Then I could look like one of those hardcore European Physics people.

I’ve been way too busy lately. I have no time for anything. No free time. Stanford is really crazy.

I was at an office hours yesterday with a TA, and this frantic guy came in the room. He started asking if the optional problems on the homework were for extra credit. The TA said it wasn’t, and only was for practice.

At this point, the frantic guy said something about how he lost points because for his other class, he did not know that the optional problems were for extra credit. Then, he proceeded to talk about how he has to get a 100% on every homework. At this point, the TA and the rest of us were chuckling: who is this guy? And why is he so anal? Homework really doesn’t account for much of the class. Then, the frantic guy said the most absurd statement:

We about died at this point. He was dead serious. The TA asked what religion that was, but no real answer was made.

Seriously, I am frightened if all my competition at Stanford were like this guy. People like that are maniacs. After explaining this to Tippy, she said she never knew people like that even existed. I knew they existed, but I just have never seen one up close.

I love going to Lozano’s car wash. If you’re in the bay area and have never experienced a Lozano-caliber wash, you should definitely pull into one.

It’s pure machinary. Your park your car, and leave it to near the vacuums. Suddenly, two or three people come and hurridly vacuum and detail the interior. No more than three minutes later, your car is driven to the car wash. But this is no cheapo brush car wash like all the others.

Sure there are the machine brushes that sweep the sides and top of your car. Where Lozano’s really shines is in the hand cleaning. The workers literally swarm your car like bees. But this is not a chaotic swarm. Every person serves a purpose, and they do each purpose very well.

One person sprays the inside windshield while another details the front of the car. Another comes on the other side of the car and wipes the inside windshield while another details the crevices in the interior doors.

It all moves so quickly.

All of this happens in such a short time span you can hardly take it in. By the time the vehicle reaches the end of the brushes your car is nearly spotless, both inside and out. It’s then driven to a designated spot and hand detailed even further. Of course this is all done under your watchful eye in case they miss any spots. This is how all car washes should be.

On top of it all, you get free lemonade and popcorn. How can you beat that? All for $9.99.

There’s always more clutter.

Labor day weekend came upon us. We saw a great oppurtunity to clean out our small apartment. “Easy enough”, I proclaimed. We began to sort. Papers from work, papers from bills, papers from everywhere. We must have accrued over 10 lbs. of useless paper in our file cabinet.

It always seems like the more we clean, the more clutter comes to the surface. It’s frightening to think what would happen if we ceased to organize and let everything fall into place. I suppose some people do that, but I have to wonder how they find anything.

Anyway, happy belated Labor Day!

I’ve been itching to redesign my blog for a long time now. It’s been
through many different versions, and now lands at the lowest common
denominator: a tweaked Blogger template. I decided not to really care
for a while, since I didn’t have time. So I kept it simple, with no
arduous decisions being made.

My goals for a redesign include

• Clean minimalist design. White space galore.
• Domain maybe? If so, then I’m moving to movableType, or something
  else that’s server side. Otherwise, I’ll stick with Blogger for the
  moment.
• Advanced photo albuming, with little upkeep needed.
• And of course, a constant stream of posts.

I’ve always wanted to provide a full serving of blogging, but I was
never disciplined enough to put time into the design of the site (both
aesthetically, and functionally) enough to keep me satisfied. I want a
site that will last, and be able to represent bits and pieces of my life
in the coming years.

Even though I mentioned Blogger as a lowest common denominator, many
people don’t give it the credit it deserves. I’ve heard from at least
two or three bloggers that they chose to hand edit their own blogs
because Blogger (or some other service) didn’t allow custom templates.
I was stunned (to say the least). Hand editing HTML on each and every
page on your own blog is quite a valiant effort, and not one I would
stick to.