high on palo alto

On the way to campus, I saw a kid doing a (Wushu) windmill on the sidewalk, advertising a car wash held at Palo Alto high.

I went, naturally, after circling around a bit, and the volunteers washed off the dirt that my fuel efficient Japanese car had accrued from our 850 miles drive from 98102 to 94040 (two tanks of gas, megaman!).

I wrote a suggestion to bloglines just now, telling them that their policy for showing updated blog entries only makes sense to the people who wrote the system. Typical programmers right? The users tell them that they see duplicate entries, and the coderz say, hey, it's as designed, you just have to check the "last updated field" on the buzz thingy bar, and you can exclude updates by clicking on this and then this and then this and then you hit the Tom Brokaw "Insert bar".

Is there an easily transliterated sound that corresponds to "Broken!" If not, there should be, and I would transliterate it here for comic effect.

Why doesn't bloglines just tell us, hey! this entry has been updated. If you really want to see the updated entry click here.

I ended the suggestion saying that I would be happy to drive to their headquarters and bonk whoever designed this misfeature, but that satisfaction may not be worth 3.50 USD (note: actual dollar value may vary and was not calculated using a mash-up between GasBuddy, Google Maps, and the fuel efficiency of my Toyota.)

Today, after buying a copy of DavidHH's RoR book and a sleek volume titled Designing Interfaces (30% off with a Border's reward card? That's hot. And just barely above Amazon price. Yes, I rock, I know it), I stopped by campus to work out parking for the summer (51 USD is soo much cheaper than the 120+ USD I spent on parking alone each month last year, and it would cost 15+60=75 USD to take the Caltrain each month this summer).

I was going to ask P the meta-q I thought about last night, but instead I just came home, pitched a research idea to my friends and family who are doctors(-to-be), and decided that even though, being in academia, I could err on the side of being open (yay!) and detail the project plan here, I could just talk to one of my friends who used to work at NVIDIA (now at UCSD), and we could just start a company in our spare part time (a phrase that seems to take on a different meaning as a graduate student) and see where it goes from there.

I pitched the idea to my mom, and she understood but was skeptical, as she always seems to be. There's so many variables you're not controlling for dear, is what she would say if she were a stereotypical American mad scientist mom, which she's not, as far as I can tell, and so she said the same thing in different words and with her own style, when I started talking about how the research findings I talked about could be connected up somehow indirectly with the incidence and prevalence of cancer...

I should mention, here, ending my tale, that today I got my dirty car washed and paid ten dollars for the deed. The money went, so I was told, to helping to fight cancer.