Off to Japan! Wish me luck.
btw - Boston / Amherst Homecoming pics are on my homepage!

Finished putting all my digital pics online. Rock on! It took me only about 2 hours after uploading to set everyting up. Considering that it's about 1 gig, or about 2400 pictures, that's pretty damn good. Again, this php/imagemagik combo is killer. One thing though - if you're looking at a picture, or thumb that nobody has viewed before, load times may be a little longer, since the server has to actually resize the picture before it displays.
Boston Week:
Boston was a good time all-around. During this past week, I think I've seen my mood turn around for the better, despite having gotten sick at the end. I'm getting excited about going to Japan, regardless of how the interview turns out. Anyways to recap the week:
- Flew into Boston from Dallas, first-class all the way, baby!
- Drunken Karaoke, rocked the house singing "Total Eclipse of the Heart" with my bud Inny
- Friday, went into Inny's startup office, and helped her set some stuff up
- Met an Amherst alumn downtown to chat. Yummy chai tea. Dashed hopes of going into econ consulting. Fuzzy thoughts of what I want to do with my life begin to clear up. Hope reigns.
- Meet Jiyoun at her apartment, meet her crazy roomates. Yum Japanese dinner at Porter Square.
- Picked up by Jeanne to pick up Eliot at Logan. Meanwhile Inny is picking up Inok from the train station.
- Head straight to Ginza and to the Sake bottles. Garrett stops by and ups our white-count to one(1). More drinking ensues. Joined by the famous Coolidge boys, Chris Lanning, Shanika (sp?), and John Kim. Hilarity ensues.
- Head back to Inny's for all-night Gestures death-match. The girls win, the boys lose.
- Saturday, wake up way too late and feeling way to crappy to make it to the homecoming game on time. Arrive at Amherst at 5pm.
- First task: buy Amherst paraphanalia (sp?) at Hastings. Then campus tour, ending at Memorial hill (sigh). Head down to the cage for reunion with long-lost peeps.
- Dinnertime - head out for a whirlwind gastronomical tour including Fresh-side, Antonio's, and Judys.
- the peeps head back to boston, but I'm in this one for the long haul. For me, next-step: Zumbyes party.
- arrive, and it's in full swing. Grab a beer, and sing. Mike Arauz gets drunk. Hell, we all get drunk. Stupendious to see all my brothers in song, all our faithful (and beautiful!) groupie/fans.
- After my 5th beer, we head to tap. Tap is lame, but we don't care. We're drunk alumni.
- Crash in pratt. Back to Boston the next evening. (thanks for the car ride !jcmin!)
- Dinner with the peeps at Pho Pasteur (sp?). Meet Chris again with his woman. Go to Border Cafe (great memories). Did a stupid amount of Tequila shots, built even more great memories.
- Woke up next morning feeling exhausted. Decide not to drink for rest of week.
- Mon/Tue - hung out with Eliot in Boston. Met up with my bud Hui Zhao, co-founder of the now defunct International Hui Association for lunch and fun.
- Esro leaves tuesday night. Din-din with Tony, leslie, and jcmin. Hey - it's half the Tsrema quartet!
- Wednesday is spent reading up on UML
- Thursday - lunch with inny, jeanne, and gwalker and company. Then I fly home.....
[snippit written on my palm on the plane:]
Flew home on United as usual... I've been flying first class a lot recently since my stockpile of upgrade certificats that i've collected the past two years of hyper-travel are starting to expire. Anyways, after a yummy dinner (1st class airplane food is - believe it or not - superyummy), i picked up a copy of the hemispheres magazine (united's in-flight mag) and was mini-shocked to discover the article "three perfect days in Dallas" (those of you who are frequent united flyers should be familiar with the "tree perfect days..." series). As you all know (or don't know), I'm not Dallas's biggest fan. It, therefore didn't surprise me to discover that the vast majority of recommended points of "interest" were either 1) places to eat, or 2) places to shop. Blech dallas.

The other plane story goes like this:
So, on my flight from boston, I sit down on the 2 seat side of the plane. My row-buddy is already there. He seems to be digging in the front-pocket in front of him. He suddenly turns to me saying, "please, don't be scared - I just found something I don't like", whips out a big blue plastic glove, and grabs two mini-vials out of the seat-pocket in front of him, and walks out of the plane. This, of course, freaks the shit out of me. I'm thinking to myself, this must be one of the supermen-air-marshals that i've heard all about. He doesn't come back until the whole plane is full and the doors are about to close. I then learn that no, he doesn't work for the airline, he was just worried about the vials he found so he went and showed the pilot. "Where did you get the blue glove from then??" I interrogate him. Turns out, he's an engineer, so he just happened to have it. "What was the vial thingys all about??" again I asked. He didn't know either. Great.... Later, the flight attendant comes by, wispers to the guy, and I learn that the vials were for a niccotine inhaler, used by a previous passanger who had our favorite addiction, and couldn't smoke, but still needed the drug. Fast-beating heart slows down. Tunrs out, my row-partner, Carlos, is a jolly fellow from Brazil. I correctly guess his accent, and we chat a bit about Brazil and how Lanfranco, Amherst Orchestra conductor, chamber music coach, and music-god, was also Brazillian.

Delay after delay, finally returned to Dallas, where my sister is home from college for the weekend. Yay!
I AM 37% GEEK.

I probably work in computers, or a history
deptartment at a college. I never really
fit in with the "normal" crowd. But I have
friends, and this is a good thing.

Just modified the Photo Album code. Now it deals with three different sized images: full (original), screen (30%), and thumb (50x50). It should make it possible for dial-up people to view the pictures, and should make load-times zippy-fast for broadband people. The cool thing is that it resizes and creates the screen and thumb images on the fly as needed!. The whole Linux/PHP/ImageMagik platform is amazing. It really only took me about an hour (or less) to modify the code to achieve this pretty huge piece of functionality. Rock on! You may also be wondering why I'm still up at 4:30 in the morning!! It's because I'm forcing myself to start adjusting to Japan time. But, really, it's just an excuse to stay up late and code. Lots of exciting things to tell about my week in boston. Updates to come soon! g'night!