January 2007 Archives

Photo.net is a forum in which photographers submit portfolios, and rate and discuss them. It's really pretty neat to go through the photos - many of them are digitally altered, but that only enhances their beauty -- for the most part. It's nice to see the Luddite unalterted purism phenomenon start to evaporate in the face of cheap desktop photo alteration. The comments and ratings people attach at the bottom are also worth a look.

My Dad has a photo.net portfolio. Very cool. My favorite was the Girl with Red Blindfold (can you see the girl?), but now I'm leaning towards Switching Tracks. Boy that's a nice picture.

Anyway, enjoy. Two posts in one day (or waking period, I should say)... I'm exhausted.

I swung by Ann Arbor's Pita Pit today on my way home from school to pick up some dinner. Good place. Today it was pretty empty. I think maybe there was one other customer there. There was only one guy behind the counter. This was around 4:20. I ordered two falafel pita wraps - one with the works, with feta cheese but minus bell and jalapeno peppers, and one with the works, with swiss cheese.

The counter guy was a remarkably friendly young man. "Glad to be back?" he asked me. He must have noticed the bulging black bag slung around my shoulder.

"Mixed feelings. You?" He looked like a student. He had student-length stubble.

"I'm not actually a student..." he said. "As a matter of fact, I own this place."

"Oh yeah? My fiance and I love this place..."

"It means a lot to hear that. I opened this place up about a year ago. A year ago in May. A few years ago it was owned by another guy but it closed down."

He folded over the lip of the pita and self-adhered it with delicious tzatziki sause. The pita was stuffed so much that it bulged and split a little on the sides. I didn't mind. I appreciated his generosity.

I tried to make more conversation. "So, is this place a chain?"

"...Yeah, it's a franchise." I felt like I had used the C word.

He finished up the wraps and handed them to me without a bag. "And you, my friend, are in business." He smiled. I thanked him and left. Inexplicably, I felt somewhat suspicious that he told me I was in business. But the pitas, as usual, we delicious.

The Ann Arbor Pita Pit is one of our favorite restaurants. It's on State Street, south of Washington street. Think of it like a healthy Subway for pita sandwiches - loads of fixings, and you choose them. They make them right in front of you. I heartily recommend the falafel pita.

The ride home on the AATA was a lot less pleasant. I overheard a somewhat educated guy sermonizing to a less educated guy. Both a little younger than me, by the looks of it. Or maybe a lot. It's true that a little knowledge (and not enough) makes a person really dangerous.

The educated guy was rambling on offensively about all sorts of topics, but one point stoked my ire the most. I'll summarize his comments here.

"To be gay is a moral outrage. It has nothing to do with religion or politics. What kind of potion does a man have to drink to think that a man with a woman is not beautiful? The gays say they can't help it - that they're born like that. But even though they're born gay, they need not carry out the sex act. It's not like their gay lover is going to explode if they don't have sex with them. They lie to society effectively because first they lie to themselves to the extent that they believe it, and then they can convince others that it's not evil. Gay sex is evil, plain and simple."

I was surprised at the educated guy's grasp of the world. He cited the fact that some primates like bonobos exhibit homosexual behavior -- which is true. He also had a very good and correct grasp of Darwinian evolution. He was well-spoken, knowledgable, articulate, and confident. He had the kind of rare articulation where I would sometimes - involuntarily - find myself agreeing with parts of his trains of thought. That is, until his idiotic, bigoted conclusions. But that man had a gift. I could see the other, less-educated guy nodding... letting it sink in. It was getting through to him, like some sort of revelatory brainseed, to be grown and propagated to other impressionable, fertile minds.

I wanted to wring the educated guy's neck and scream, "What the hell are you doing?"

But I got off the bus instead. My stop had come.

But it's just as well. After all, who am I to tell him what he should regard as right or wrong?

Not an escape, really. Actually Heather and I were really bummed out about having to leave. We spent New Year's Eve and New Year's Day with Andrew and Momo, in their nice apartment in Manhattan. It was a real blast.

We decided, thankfully, not to go to Times Square on New Year's Eve. We walked around near it, but police cordoned it off and we couldn't enter unless we walked about ten blocks down. Which is just as well - we were tired and lazy. Or should I say, I was. Instead, we spent some time at what appeared to be a semi-gothic-decorated bar, and then at Mexican restaurant Senor Swanky's in the Village. We got home in time to see the ball drop on TV, and an emaciated, decrepit, speaking-out-of-half-the-side-of-his-face Dick Clarke shoving his tongue down his wife's throat - Al and Tipper Gore style. He actually didn't look as bad as described by my sister Kelly from last year - but he sounded awful. Poor guy. I'd still watch him over Carson Daly, though.

New Year's Day was a blast too. We headed down to the Museum of Modern Art and looked at about half of the pieces there. It was incredibly crowded that day -- and the museum is big. There were a lot of very famous paintings there. Heather observed that it was weird because we had already seen most of these paintings before - in art and art history class textbooks, and as pop culture icons. Still, it was cool to see Starry Night and The Persistence of Memory in person, even though I felt like a sardine trying to squeeze my way up through the crowd to see it.

After the art museum, we went to a little sake bar called Sake Hana - near their apartment. This was my favorite part of visiting them. We were virtually the only people there, and it was so cozy and warm. And they played good music - but not too loud. After a few hours there, we went to the companion sushi restaurant Sushi Hana. Good sushi there. Fusion-style.

Yeah, all in all it was an excellent trip, and it was a bummer to leave. It was even more of a bummer driving home. Eleven hours - YIKES!

Here's a picture of us - and my new desktop - courtesy of Momo's camera and a stranger's aesthetic. The tree in the background is the one in front of Rockefeller Center. Check out my work gloves. Sexy.

Good times.

So, today was my first class of the new semester. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get into John Holland's Adaptive Systems class. I'm on a waiting list about a mile long. It was a happy accident, however, as I was able to get into possible a more interesting class - Networks: Theory and Application (not necessarily computer networks), taught by Lada Adamic. I just recently got really interested in networks after reading Albert-Laszlo Barabasi's laymen book Linked (well, strictly speaking I'm not yet done with it, but I've read enough to know that there's a lot of good stuff there). The diversity of the class members is pretty staggering. There are a few other computer scientists in the class, but there are also staticians, physicists, biologists, linguists, and economists in the class. It's going to be a good course, I think. It's also a project-driven course, so I'm very excited about that.

As it turns out, I'm taking another networks class - this time, it is a computer networks class -- which makes it difficult for me to explain my curriculum to anyone interested. Again.