blogwaffe

Michelle got a call from a good college friend of hers on Friday telling her that she’d be in Santa Monica for the weekend at an Ultimate Frisbee tournament. Not having any set plans for Saturday, we decided to drive down in the afternoon to hang out. The problem? It was raining Saturday.

Most people who’ve lived in the area for more than a few months dislike driving the freeways in the rain. There’s two main reasons for this. First, since it rains so seldom here, the water brings up a lot of oil from the roads when it actually does precipitate. Second, and for the same reason of frequency, LA drivers aren’t any good at driving in the rain; they go too fast, think they can stop faster than the conditions allow, and can’t control their cars when they skid out.

Having lived in Pasadena for well over the specified time interval, I count myself both among the people who dislike driving LA highways in the rain, and now among the people who cause chaos when they try.

We were driving down the 110 and had to stop short. My wheels locked, and (close your eyes, Mom) the car skidded across two of three lanes of traffic (thank the Lord there wasn’t anyone in the next lane). I got back control of the car and managed to avoid hitting anything: both cars and walls. Everyone was fine. We went on our merry way (after being stuck in traffic for thirty minutes or so).

Personally, the worst part of the whole experience was that I had a passenger with me; though she was able to help calm me down afterward, I don’t think I’d have been as freaked if Michelle hadn’t been sitting in the passenger seat. The best part (if there is one) is that I humbly believe my reaction times will be significantly faster if anything like that happens again (though I pray nothing will). There’s at least that to be said for honest to God experience.

A great deal can happen in a month. With all that potential material, allow me to describe some of what happened this past month in as boring a way as possible.

Paul.za and I went home to .id.us for Christmas, and I’d like to think he wasn’t bored to tears. Watery eyes, perhaps, but not tears. I had loads of fun seeing everybody back home (a shoutout to Siri who says she reads this from time to time and to Brendan who at least used to). Good to see Ed, Father Matt, and everyone I ever knew from my graduating class. But enough name dropping, on to the excitement.

Hm… it could only possibly be exciting if you knew all the names, so suffice it to say I had a good time with the fam and everyone else. New years with Lincoln and Hannah rocked (though Chana was conspicuously absent), and the trip back to Pasadena was fine except that, even with a direct flight, I still managed to have a layover.

I’m convinced that my Motorola RAZR cellphone does not tell time accurately.

The phone has a little external LCD panel that displays the time and other pertinent information so that I don’t have to flip the phone open to check on things. Normally, this panel is not backlit in order to conserve energy, but there’s an easily accessible button on the edge of the phone that lights up the screen. When I hit the button to check the time on my phone, about forty or fifty percent of the time the digital clock ticks over to the next minute.

That’s very odd; I’m not looking at the screen for more than two seconds (max). That means, I’d expect to see the minute change about once every thirty times, assuming the times at which I check the time are uniformly randomly distributed within the sixty second interval between minute digit changes. One out of thirty is not even four percent; there’s an order of magnitude difference between the expected and observed values. I must have checked the time on with the phone more than five hundred times by now, so this is definitely statistically significant. This discrepancy leads me to the following hypothesis.

My RAZR is programmed to change the minute digit on the display when I click the button if its internal clock is within a twenty or thirty second window around the actual time at which the seconds should roll over back to zero.

If true, it’d have to have been a deliberate design decision. Perhaps people remember the time better after reading a digital clock if they see the digits change and Motorola is just helping me out? I haven’t yet thought of a different explanation.

A conversation with Michelle led me to state that Batman is a good Caltech superhero in the following sense. He adheres to an ethos of vigilante justice, relies on technology and intelligence (and shit big computers) rather than superpowers to get the job done (most of the time…), has an underground hideout and enjoys things with rubber nipples. I should note that it was this last point that really sold Michelle on the idea.

I’m curious to hear other nominations.

Greg, circus-certified strong man that he is, recently installed a pull up bar in our apartment. I tried it out and managed seven pull ups before stopping. The next day I did eight. Two points make a line, so I decided to extrapolate the data at hand and make the following prediction.

The number of ups I am capable of contiguously pulling will increase by one up per day I use the pull up bar.

My prediction has proven to be accurate so far, and I’m currently at 10 pull ups. Assuming I use the bar most days, by this time next year, I’ll be doing something like 300 pull ups! A Popeye amongst Olive Oils! Fear my bulging biceps or… triceps… pectins… lemurs… whatever the hell is on my beefy ass arms! Fear those things!

Greg, upon hearing of my awesome plan, told me of a similar workout method:

1. Adopt a baby pig.
2. Lift it above your head every day.
3. Impress the hunnies with your freakishly strong “bod”.
4. Eat much bacon.

Brilliant. That must be how he became a circus-certified strong man. Having not the porcine access he did in his youth, I’ll stick to the pull up bar and see how it goes.

Photos (on Flickr):

• Caltech Activities Fair
• My birthday party
• My trip to Santa Cruz to visit Haskell and Joanna
• Kristin’s birthday party

Feel free to comment here or there.

While I clearly had the right of way, there are no hard feelings. I made some bad (read “stupid”) assumptions about how you would behave in the situation, and the whole problem could have been avoided if I weren’t thinking about the k-Local-Hamiltonian problem while trying to read the road.

In case you’re wondering why I didn’t stop sooner, I had a fair bit of momentum built up. Stopping any shorter than I did would have caused me to go over the handle bars, and I think we can both agree that it’s better you hit my wheel (which was unscathed) than my head (which would have been lucky had it received only a scathe or two).

Also, I should have pulled over to talk to you, but as there were no injuries or damages (and since I wasn’t thinking super clearly on account of having just been hit by a car) I went on my (honestly) merry way. (And I complain that I never meet new people.)

Should the occasion again arise, I’ll be smarter on both fronts. Unfortunately, I doubt you’ll ever see this. I think you were Caltech, though, so maybe you know someone who knows someone who’ll point you over here. My email can be found from the “contact” link in the upper right if you have the inclination.

(Yes, Mom, I’m fine, and it is my firm belief that she is as well.)

I was recently looking for some information on Bank of America‘s site but was being frustrated by their servers’ poor response time. Eventually, Bank of America spewed back the following at me.

Your browser couldn’t connect you to the page you attempted to access.

Jackasses. My browser is not the problem. Don’t try to foist this on me; get your servers in line.