New York, New York! (1)

I have many many great pictures from Lake Placid, like this one:


and this one:


but I really have to quit it or else I will travel again and the new york pictures will not be up.

First of all, in our first day in New York we didn't do much but we walked like crazy!! It was also the only day in which I brought my climbing shoes to Central Park to boulder. Alas, it was raining and thus I didn't climb. Good walking shoes and a big backpack to store shopping (I confess - but what can I do, everything was on SALE!) bring you a long way. Even though, to be honest, a big backpack will get you searched almost everywhere and will get you being sent to the huge queue for the luggage room at the Met.

First, our hotel. We stayed at Mont Morris Bed & Breakfast and it was amazing! This old brownstone house with wooden squeaky floors and great wall decorations just at the tip of Harlem. We loved it! (I loved it more than mom I guess, because she had to go down the squeaky steps to go out to smoke, haha!) This was part of our room. I LOVED the orange walls!! (our second room when we came back from lake placid had black walls with a golden dragon, no pics, sorry)


First stop, the Port Authority Terminal to buy bus tickets, all via Times Square. Well. A lot of flashing signs and a HUGE waste of power if you ask me, but then again, who am I to say anything?


Sentient un-crowding life forms on Broadway:


A McDonald's franchise with an identity crisis:


Me and my friend Morgan. He's looking for quick ways of escape from the pink singlet.


Central Park and Empire State from the Top of the Rock (Mom found 20 dollars on the ground there).



Inside St. Patrick's Cathedral.


Central Park - even though trekking possibilities were presented (in the form of an area that is kept wild intentionally) we didn't because mom was wearing sandals.




And finally, inside the Met. Mom went to ask where Van Gogh and Picasso were only to be met with a look full of contempt from one of the curators: "Oh, you mean the impressionists? Go straight down, then left" with a bored wave of the arm. I cleared our name when, after we got lost in the myriad of paintings, I went to another curator and asked in a strong voice: "Excuse me, where are the impressionists?" . Culture. I Need It.


Purists, beware.


The rest of the pics from our first day in new york are here.

Apple Store Rant

I have to vent my anger because if I don't I will throw this laptop out of the window. NAO. So I went to the apple store in New York. So to speak, I visited the mothership. And the fathership, and whatever you want to call it. Specifically, to ask technical questions about Marian's laptop and mine. Below is the list of questions:

1. I have the 13 inch unibody. The black keys get grease marks on them and the plastic seems to retain the grease even after I thoroughly clean it. What to do? (Don't tell me to clean it, because I am doing that already)


2. My friend has a Macbook pro, early 2008 and his battery is down to 80 % after about 100 cycles. On your website you say that battery is guaranteed to 80% after 300 cycles. Laptop is out of 1 year warrantee. What to do?


3. That same friend has a NVIDIA Graphics card and sometimes because of that the screen shows some lines - goes away after reboot. NVIDIA offers 5 years warrantee for the graphics cards :D What to do?

First of all, the dungeon in the mothership (you have to go down some stairs) was crowded.

First Stop: Laurel and Hardy

And because it was crowded I actually went to ask where to get some info. Got directed to "people in light blue tshirts". So I scanned the area and I saw two light blue tshirt guys standing side by side but otherwise NOT TALKING not looking, just basically STONING. It was obvious that they weren't doing anything. So I go to them and ask: sorry to bother you guys, can I ask you some techincky questions? To which the short guy says: "Yeah sure, no problem, just as soon as we finish with a customer" and he turns to the other one and says: "yeah, about that screen, do you think she'll be able to replace it?", "Yeah, i don't know .. " says the other, at which both turn their backs on me and continue to talk about the "lady with the screen". As if I was born in the US and didn't come from Romania where SLACKING IS LIVING!!!!

I grind my teeth and continue (I don't like crowded places and crowded places WITH IDIOTS make me puke)

Third Stop: Confused Redhead
Thought I was talking about a lady, huh? Well not really :)) I went to this redhead guy, and the answers to my questions were:

1. "You can clean your keyboard with this!" and shows me iKlean. "I already use it, do you have anything else?" "Well, here we don't have anything" "And where do you have something else" "Um ... well we don't have anything else"


2. "Your friend should bring the laptop to the genius bar, they can run a diagnostic on the battery there" "But I already have a diagnose, how else would i know all this?" "Yeah you're right ... If it's out of warrantee then the battery is a consumable and we do not offer support" [I KNEW I HAD A WINNER HERE]


3. I barely had finished my question when the blitz-krieg answer came: "If it's out of warrantee then we do not support anything"

So I looked if I could get to a genius (dark blue t-shirt) but they were all behind a desk and 2 people were manning the queue - marian had told me that you need a FUCKING appointment. However, I found somebody that was idling next to the genius bar.

Last Stop: At least I will ask
I didn't bother with the first question. For the second one since I knew that at least this one would actually think before flapping his mouth, after he told me the well-known line "If it's in warrantee then of course we cannot change it. The specified terms are if something happens and it's in warrantee, even if we don't write it there" (do you think they have this hot wired in their brains?!) Anyhow, I knew that this one would listen to logic so I asked "Yeah but the battery has more parameters that you also guarantee (i.e. after 300 cycles, not 100)" -I didn't use the i.e. :) ... In the end he went (by his own free will - no glaring from my part or anything) to ask a genius.

While I waited, there was another -light-blue-is-for-i-don't-have-a-brain-t-shirt guy next to him. A guy came to him to ask "Hey, i am using skype but somehow when i use headphones i cannot hear. i can hear if i don't have any headphones. Is there some setting i can change that's to do with headphones?" To which the light-blue-screen-of-death guy answers: "We do not offer Skype support". And that was it. I MEAN C'MON!!!!!! Meantime, my genius-bar-drone returned to say that the warrantee thing still stands.

I didn't bother with him anymore, I was too disgusted and really wanted to get out of there as soon as possible (gone were marian's other, even more specific questions :)) ).

I am writing this rant because it's been one hour since I am trying to delete photos from my hard drive using iPhoto. Either I am crazy or stoopid (very possible) or something is wrong. I am deleting photos from the "Photos library" then emptying the iPhoto Trash BUT THE PHOTO IS STILL on my hard drive. No photos today either. Pfft.

Updates from the front

Just spent 4 hours entertaining a visitor from another university (1 hour was my presentation) so now my brain is shot so I cannot do any work. Ergo I am slacking.

- i walked home yesterday as promised in the previous post. How is it that everytime you want to take the bus none arrives but when you decide to walk there are zillions of them passing by? It was a great effort on my will power not to board any of them! Anyhow, it took me 24 minutes to get home from the gym. Good, good!

- i have a small violet patch on one of my toenails. Am waiting for it to decide what to do with my foot.

- i have started writing my thesis. I have now 1 (ONE) paragraph.

- do not ask me how new york was because I will instantly feel guilty for not organizing the photos and posting them here. TOMORROW!! (Ergo some more slacking tomorrow).

- am registering for Standard Chartered Marathon TOMORROW. Even though my ankle is still VERY weak.

- i seem to be doing a lot of things TOMORROW.

Shame.

I live like, about 3 km from school. And I take two buses to get home. Instead of just walking. PFFFT. This will be one instance in which THE.FAT.WON'T.WIN !!!!

Reviews, I like

Below a short list of phrases and constructions that made my day today. All spelling errors are as found in the submitted papers.

• Using a monotinically increasing global counter, but it is very difficult to maintain global counter in distributed environment



• In Internet, which is a very complex system [1], ...



• But generally speaking, the existing CA methods failed to insufficiently consider the characteristics of network itself and not taking into account of such details as the packet loss due to ....



• The simulation results show that the model is reasonable in a certain sense and provides references for a more thorough study of network behavior.



• Relative Works [instead of Related Work]



• With the continuous increasing complexity of computer applications, the scale of software systems is becoming sweeping, meanwhile, the complexity of the task enhances unbelievably, and the concurrency of software has been continuously strengthened.



• However, in practice, many errors occurred in a few days or even months after the system start, in this case it is clear that to find the location of errors by rerun system is obviously laborious and time-consuming, even worse, the occurrence of some error are closely dependent on the other events, even for the rerun of the system, it may not take the error occurred again, especially if the complicated multi-tasking system, as a result of the uncertainty of the order of task execution, quite some software failures are always difficult to recur. [this phrase has 94 words]



• Shared memories between ... and ... are the media for log data transfer.



• Fourthly, we support replaying in diffident computers because of the isolation of log and replay system. [THIS ONE CRACKS ME UP!!]



• the virtual machine-based replay technology has become a hot pot.

Single-mindedness

While everybody is in Krabi I am stuck in Singapore pulling plastic. Pfft. Such (suck?) is life. I am not going to write a whiny post about this though. What I really wanted to say is that in general climbers are so obsessive that they will be more than happy to pull plastic for eons in the hope of getting some strength/technique/power which they will showcase on rock. Even if the promise of that particular rock is millions and zillions of light years away. Me? I am everyday bypassing that - I have a small piece of limestone that found its way in my chalk bag after my short climbing stint in romania, so in that respect, I am touching rock everyday woo hoo!

But yes, I am obsessive*. Even though to this day I am still (in good days) a mediocre climber. Top my obsessiveness with the fact that I come out as fierce (to people who don't know me that well) and you have ... well ... a mess. For example, for two years now, I have given up on getting my non climbing friends to climb. I had given up with the conclusion that they are wusses and they do not deserve me trying to get them to the sport. I did however try to get them to do any sport so we ended up walking, doing pull ups (ha!) and playing tennis. With new acquaintances forming up in the horizon I am more than tempted to get them to climb yay! This is probably because climbing is so inherently part of me that I hafta share it! And now comes the problem! My new acquaintances definitely see me as fierce - directly proportional with the size of my biceps on some days and my bluntness (every day) so when I say "We are climbing on sunday. Period." I am not sure whether their positive answer is a consequence of my fierceness or whether they really wanna climb. Top that with "Oh, we are going cycling in Pulau Ubin on Sunday ..." (five days later) and my [silent] answer of choice "FINE. I am going climbing thankyouverymuch." and an anti-social mess ensures.

I am trying to curve that mess by climbing on Saturday (in school) and maybe doing something social (like shopping) on Sunday. And also instituting a 3-No-answers-means-I-never-ask-again rule.

* a good thing though is that I have not yet reached a state whereby i watch climbing videos and read [tons] of climbing related articles.

Out and about

With NUS announcing everybody that there's no need to observe quarantine I am now officially out and about. I would love to sound more cheerful but there you have it, I am not. The first thing to do with my new found (not that lost either) freedom was to go running. I guess i had not realized how dreadful Sundown Marathon was for me until I bent towards my running shoes and suddenly I was cringing and didn't want to do it anymore. While I suppose that as a runner you will have bad races and good races (probably more bad than good), it is still interesting to see the effect that 4 hours of pain can have on the human psychic. Top that with the fact that my ankle still feels weird and it's no wonder that 10 minutes into the run when my iPod died on me, I was more than happy to call it a night. Aargh!

Now of course I was in the gym before you could say "H1N1" in a pathetic attempt to up my endurance. I knew i lost it considering that I did not climb for so long but I didn't know it would be so lost, it's not even in the gym anymore! I'll have to post notices at the bus stations around the gym: "If anybody has seen my endurance to call 94222... ! Last spotted: end of June huffing and puffing around NUS gym. Big reward guaranteed!"

Wild life. Livin' it behind ur back

This is probably one of my best pics ever (click to enlarge). On our last day mom and I took the advice of some utter idiot and walked about 20 km. The plan was to trek to this small mountain and back. But you see, americans have absolutely no sense of distances (i guess because their ass is in their cars most of the time) so when somebody draws you a map and says that it's close (when you ask if you can walk for it), they mean it's close IF YOU HAVE A CAR! Eh, nonetheless the trip was not wasted because I managed to capture this. I initially saw this deer in the woods when he/she jumped in some bushes but I could feel that s/he wanted to cross the street so I turned and waited and there it was. It all lasted about 20 seconds and 4 frames but it was great! (In part, one of the reasons i didn't go fuming back to the idiot to tell her that we walked for over 20 km and we didn't even get to the bloody lodge she mentioned)



The sights were very nice though.


The iron concoctions that you see are the ski jump ramps.


Our destination was the smaller hill in the foreground. I think.


We spiked up our asphalt trek by walking on the river boulders (my mother is 55 years young by the way)





All in all, a lovely thing to do on our last day in Lake Placid.


PS. Now that I am back in Singapore I have to quarantine for 1 week. I hate it and am in the process of banging my head on the walls. I hate being inside and moreover, being forced to stay inside. Pfft.

The land of the stupid commercials

There's the

- old men/women talking about how they do not want to impose on their children the costs of their funeral and thus they prefer this or that insurance where it doesn't matter how old you are or any medical history, "for just 35 cents a day"

- cyallis or viagra commercial for men to be "prepared when the moment's right"

- class action law suits calling for potential victims of "if you have been diagnosed with mesothelioma call this number; if "you work with asbestos or have been diagnosed with " this and that call here

- prescription drug commercial where they do not say what exactly the drug is for but rather how the patient (good looking men or women in their forties) feel after taking it, but "it might cause liver cancer" or "do not donate blood for six months " after taking this or that

- microsoft commercial where people want to search something online and thus they go to microsoft's search engine, "let's bing it!" (WTF?!)

- specific targeted commercial - "our product achieves 15 percent more protection against reflected sun rays than neutrogena" or our cereal is much better than the other cereal

- the computer doctor selling computer savvy cds by phone mail. Dun forget to order the hit "How to buy and sell on ebay"

PFFT.

Lake Placid and Ducktown

Conference updates yay! Now that my presentation is over i get to blog about the conference, yay! Well, to get the nasty things out of the way, the presentation went ok. The conference location is in this amazing place called Lake Placid (photos below). Yeah I wish I could say more but I guess that all I can mutter (it is 12 am for me by singapore time) is UNFUCKINGBELIEVABLE. It is a mountain resort, not the rugged-no-vegetation-on-peaks kind that I love, but rather a mellow (the highest peak is about 2500m), lake-y region. Full of tourists and polite people. So many people have been nice and kind (again volunteering random info) that I am almost afraid that your usual american psycho will jump out of the conference rest room and gun us all to death.

The conference room shares a wall with a US Army Recruitment camp & conference. What can I say, their talks are more common sense I guess but also much louder. Hell! at one point they even had a britteney (how do you spell her name) spears soundtrack on some of their (I hope) educational movies. My mom has been roaming the resort while I go to the conference. Tomorrow we'll have a short day (until 12 only) and thus afterwards we will go hiking. Friday we'll also go hiking and then we are off to New York on Saturday (this is a whole-day trip by bus). This would leave us two more days in New York and then off to Singapore (hopefully swine-flu free).

The skies are dramatic but in a harmless sort of way (so far).




This is the place we are staying:


And this is the lake:



Our inn is right on one of the shores of Lake Placid so we get great views of the lake. Also, the duck population seems to fancy us and thus we get a lot of them when we go sit on the chairs by the lake. Below are some results of the photo session with the people of Ducktown.

Sights from JFK

This guy in a black dog suit (I mean the whole dog) holding a drawing of a very red flamingo waiting for his girl. The look on her face when she realized while scanning the crowds that the red flamingo guy in a dog suit was waiting for her. The laugh and the surprise made my sleepy-oh-my-god-i'm-so-tired-where-is-mom day. (It didn't help that she had sent me a text message from Romania saying "if it weren't for the cab company which woke me up i would have lost the plane").

Not being able to board the air train with the trolley and being separated from Mom. Following her in the next train and finding her! (She had all the money and all passports)

All in all my mom and are staying at this wonderful brownstone house with amazing decorations and creaky wooden floors (pictures to come soon) in Harlem! Close to Central Park and the neighborhood is amazing (have yet to spot white people). Hopefully tomorrow we are leaving for Lake Placid. Today the plan is to get bus tickets and then go to central park and the Met woo hoo!!

Last Days in London

I thought I would be a good girl and post the last two days in london before going to the land of the brave and of the free and where all dogs are fat and carry golden pretzels on their tail. Actually the last day wasn't much in terms of pictures because we went to the British Museum. All I can say about it is rock this, rock that, british took this, british took that, mummy this, mummy that, pottery this, pottery that. I actually had a total meltdown after about 5 hours and fell asleep on a bench while brave Marian went to have a look at Africa and Asia.

Windsor castle was great! Even though the attractions weren't much (state apartments and a miniature doll house) -- although to be honest the state apartments were amazing (so many paintings and weapons and stuffs!! -- but I loved the feel of it (I guess I like rock :D).

As a conclusion, we both loved London! London is somewhat humbling because everywhere you look in the city there's at least one historic building or statue, reminding you that at the time when your own nation's capital was a bunch of buildings and stables and markets, the british were building super castles and (let's be honest) plundering the rest of the world. Furthermore, you get to see how modern life can go on in a historic setting. The jury is still out on whether London is nicer than Paris. This is because we didn't see much of Paris and to be honest we didn't see the bad parts of any of them.

The random people we have talked to were extremely friendly (they talked to us!) something your ordinary parisian will never do I guess. When we went to Windsor we stopped by Victoria Station to check the map (I am a compulsory map checker). This guy walked up to us and asked us if we were lost. I said no but we were just deciding which way to take to windsor. Then he told us that the best way is to take a coach (and subsequently directed us towards the bus station) because the TRAINS ARE ON STRIKE (he had heard it on radio). It was very nice of him to volunteer this info, me says.

It's not only the people and the place but also the food. I know that the english food suxs big time, but! there is this chain of shops called "Pret" which sell great sandwiches and soups (I HEART soup) and, more importantly, they have one in Trafalgar Sq. You can sit down and have your lunch and people watch by Nelson's column! Woo hoo!

Without further ado, I give you Windsor Castle! And yes. That baby is sleeping and that guy (yes, he's a guy) is his father.

Not one of my best hair days, what can I say?


Changing of the guards with live band!! (The guy on the far right is a girl woohoo!)






View of Windsor:


Marian and the guards. I guess it's a guy's thing? (because I really can't understand his grin)



Back there is where the Queen lives.






Modern day knight with polyester sword. Water, degradation and rust proof.


That kid will loathe his father during teenage years. I can see.



St. George's chapel! Home to the Order of the Garter, I kid you not!



Musical in a theater on our way to the British Museum.


Inside:


One of the many treasures inside the museum (more pics here):


My "I am very hungry" glare:


More pics of Windsor here.

Joel Spolsky on Google and Microsoft

Now, Google -- which has 10,000 workers worldwide -- is very different from Microsoft, and the two businesses have very different cultures, which is evident when you visit them one after another.

When you are a guest on Google's campus, for example, you get free Wi-Fi service. You simply connect to one of the open hot spots that blanket the area, and you're ready to go. Microsoft has free Wi-Fi, too, but to use it, you have to register with a receptionist who enters your name, your affiliation, your e-mail address, and the name of the person you're visiting into some kind of computer system, which then spits out a page with a temporary password. The receptionist has to walk to the nearest copy room to pick up this page. He or she also hands you a brochure that is intended to teach you how to get on the Wi-Fi network but in reality provides little more than a stern warning that you must not ask the receptionist for any tech help, because The Receptionist Knows Nothing.

A Coke Product Marketer's Dream

Taken from the desk of a romanian intern here.

54* 92 cans of coke + 2L bottle + 0.5 L bottle = 20.32 33.16 L of coke. WTF?!

*Picture does not show all properly

Pfft

Just came back from a very expensive Physio session. The guy taught me how to tape my ankle and to ice it after I run. He said that I have a ruptured ligament but not to worry as I still have two in that area. I didn't ask if it was a full rupture or just partial.

I will take a moment to hyperventilate because I just realized I ran a marathon with a ruptured ligament. Pfft.