My Friend Chris Lau has turned into a fob:
"And if you know Dan Hui, then you must know Heehorse, which inspire this site"
he recently wrote in his website. He might as well have writen, "Haro! Dan Hui, you site imspire my site!"

I've meant for a while to send a shoutout Chris. (now's a good time, since I have this paper to write - I'm taking a break, I swear!).

Chris is one of a small group of buddies I have from St. Marks, this snotty all-boys private school I went to for two years as a kid, the others in the group being Jason (aka. Manolo - don't ask), and Wendell. You can check out our crazy new years party 2001 in my album (too lazy to make link).

Chris has had quite a few adventures recently, and the latest one brought him to Hong Kong, via a job he got under false pretenses (i.e. being able to speak Mandarin). In anycase, as evidenced above, he's slowly turning into a fob. We'd better bring him back soon.

6pmish - Usually, when I'm writing a paper, I have one or two "killer" articles for where I get the bulk of my main idea / support / backup of my paper. I've been looking, but haven't found the "killer" source for this paper yet. It's frustrating. If anyone knows of any paper written that analyzes China's WTO entry from the standpoint of international trade theory... umm, email me?

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7pmish - I think I just found my killer paper, but it's all written in italics. Argh. Makes my head spin.

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9pm - When it rains... I've just stumbled on a wealth of information - now my problem is going through the heaps of articles and finding what's most helpful. Amy stopped by and suprised me in the library earlier. I was starting to lose the ability to focus my eyes, so it was a good time for a break - we walked around Dupont, on the other side of the circle. Some really cool residential streets. But my allergies started acting up...
Apparently the oceans are being severly overfished:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3028251.stm

When Amy and I were out visiting the Monterey Bay Aquarium last summer, we got information about which fish was ecologically friendly to eat, and which were not.
Here's a link to that information - there's a link to a seafood chart for the West coast. Here's an East Coast version from a related organization.

I'm thinking maybe we should start using that.

My fear is that the world is so unstable, and people are so worried about the myriad of problems, that more fundamental things like the extinction of large predator fish will go unnoticed until there's no more sushi to eat.

On a brighter note, I'm getting some substantial work done on my paper.

Got this from Garrett.
Middle East Geography Test

One small benefit of getting my car fixed at the local Chinese-owned mechanic down the street is that, when I pick up my car, I don't have to move the seat back to normal position - for once, the mechanic dude is _not_ three times larger than I am.

I took my car in today, because after our Sushi Sushi Sushi trip on friday, as we were arriving back at Dupont Circle, I noticed my car smoking. Someone from the backseat dismissed it as "fog", but when my hood started fuming, the illusion would not hold.

After two false starts when I first (stupidly) refilled the windshield wiper fluid (doh), and then (a little smarter) refilled the coolant in the radiator, I realized that I had some major leakage from the radiator.

good thing that this little chinese fix-your-car shop was down the street, otherwise it would have been an all-day ordeal to get a tow-truck to take it to the dealer in Virginia, and then to take the metro back.

After three long grueling weeks, I'm done!

Well, I still have a medium-sized paper to write, but I have a whole week to write it.

I just turned in my last takehome last night at midnight, from a diner in Bethesda, over email via my cell phone (heh - wanted to start celebrating before I was really done).

This weekend I'm taking off. But next week should be pleasant...