Finally! Smoking ban in ashpitcity

In a not-so-close 14-1 vote, the city council passed a public smoking ban for Allegheny County! Woohoo!

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06269/725251-100.stm

...and then there was 1

All alone in Pittsburgh for ?

tea, earl grey, hot

We got a water cooler at the office that does both cold AND hot water. That's pretty exciting! Now I don't have to go to the main kitchen around the corner to get my tea. I also bought some nicer "Market District" (Tasty Eagle brand) teas so I'm not limited to Lipton anymore. My Earl Grey is cooling down at the moment. It'll be great on this cool, gray, rainy day.

Anyone who reads this already knows the big news, but I haven't actually posted it here yet. Alex got a job at the Mozilla Corporation! It's an awesome job (designing the UI of Firefox 3), in an awesome location (Mountain View, CA). You can check out videos of the Mozilla peeps and the making of the firefox crop circle here.

Alex is moving next week :( I, however, am staying in Pgh for a few more months. I don't know how many. It all depends on how business is going. It'll be lonely and sad being in the pitts, but there's a very good ending in store. I can't wait to move out to Mt. View. Most of my Cornell friends are already out there, and I LOVE our new apartment. We'll be living in Park Place which is right in downtown Mt View with lots of restaurants and walking distance to the CalTrain. There's a pool and gym (of course) and a Starbucks around the corner. We're on the 3rd floor and we have a balcony and a large walk-in pantry in the kitchen. Did I mention there was a pool?

More about moving later....

5 years later - remembering 9/11

As I was going through my old posts this weekend adding labels, I noticed that I didn’t have a post about 9/11/01. I wish I did. It’s one of those moments that you only live through once (hopefully) and writing down the experiences/emotions/facts in the moment is invaluable. So I guess I’ll recount that moment right now, 5 years after the fact. The whole day was surreal and hazy so I’m actually trying to reconstruct my morning based on the timeline presented here.

I grew up in NYC (age 8+). Maybe 3 years after we were here I actually went up to the observation floor of the WTC with a friend. It was really cool.

In September 2001, instead of being upstate in Ithaca, I was actually in D.C. doing a “Semester in Washington.” I was “extern”ing at the NIH and I got in about 9am, the usual time. My desk had a little radio on the shelf above it and every morning it was tuned to the local morning show. The DJ was named Elliot, who used to be on the morning show on Z100 in NYC ("Z Morning Zoo") which I listened to every morning on my walkman on the way to school.

On 9/11/01, I don’t remember if we turned the radio on in the middle of the show, or whether I only tuned in half-way through, but Elliot was talking about something happening in NYC, something big. Then I heard him say something about “another one, there’s been another one.” I think he was referring to the 3^rd plane (flight 77) that struck the Pentagon at 9:37am. Looking at the timeline, I don’t think I would’ve been in the lab yet for when the second plane crashed into the WTC. For the first few minutes I thought Elliot was just doing his regular shtick (he used to do a lot of crank calls on this old show). But then the people I was working with started trying to figure out what was going on. Everyone tried to get to the news online but all the sites were down (probably due to high traffic). I think I finally got Reuters.com to load and saw pictures of smoke billowing out of the twin towers.

There were 3 of us in our bay and we went on a search for a TV. Above a few floors of research labs was a dozen or so floors of patient rooms. We ended up in a waiting room on one of the top floors. We could see a little bit of smoke from the Pentagon from out the waiting room window. We turned on the TV just a few minutes before the first of the twin towers collapsed. The video was so surreal, it was like watching a movie. I had been to the WTC and around the area so many times, yet I could barely feel anything. I was just watching it dumbfounded. Then I suddenly realized that my dad drives around the city all day so I went back down to the lab to call home. I got through to my grandmother and she said she had heard from my dad and he was fine and away from the commotion. But then she said that they had been worried about me and why I hadn’t called yet. I guess the fact that DC was also a target and that I was in any possible danger never crossed my mind.

It took another hour or so for the NIH to call for an evacuation of all non-essential personnel. I took the metro home. My roommate Christine who externed at the American Museum of History had to walk back to DuPont Circle (where we lived) because by the time her building was evacuated, the metro had shut down. For the next few hours, I and my 2 roommates just watched the news. Christine was much more emotional than I was. I envied her emotional release. In a way, I also felt like a bad NYer for not being more distraught. By the evening, when video of the planes actually hitting the twin towers began to run, we’d had enough. I don’t think we turned the TV on for the following week. We just couldn’t watch it anymore. The smoke, the collapse, the rain of ash, the constant replay of the planes hitting the buildings…

Although I had worked at the NIH for about 2 weeks already, I didn’t have an ID badge since security had been non-existent. I stayed home for the next few days since security at all government buildings had suddenly tightened and I had no way of getting in.

To this day I can’t watch footage, listen to, or even read stories about 9/11/01. This morning, I watched about 10 minutes of the Today Show’s special, including the moment of silence at 8:46am, when the first plane (flight 11) flew into the north tower. Then I had to turn it off. The timeline on the Cooperative Research site is actually the first details about 9/11 that I’d read. Ever. I have no compulsion to see the Flight 93 movie, or the new WTC movie. Maybe in another 5 years. It's just so morbid. I don't need to know what the last words of the flight attendants and passengers were. It also seems inappropriate and too soon for the commercialization of this tragedy, no matter how tasteful these movies are.

blogger beta!

Sometimes, "beta" actually means beta. Definately lots of glitches, but I have faith!

How are the new colors? Too much?

I'm in the process of adding labels to my old posts, which will of course take a while. I also noticed that I gave up transferring my LiveJournal posts after 2002, so I'm missing all of 2003. I need to get to that as well.

There are also privacy options for posts now. Not sure how that works (meaning, how do I add my friends)? I guess I'll figure it all out in time.

Another question... should I start integrating my various online identities? Should I put a link to my MySpace account on here? My LinkedIn account? My google pages website? I don't know. I like the scattered nature of my online presence but I don't think that'll last very long. The internet is a total mess right now and it's very easy to get away with having a half dozen email addresses and register a few dozen blogs and networking sites to these various emails. At some point, I think everyone will have to integrate their web presence into one singular, complete "persona."

IM client (i.e. AIM) -- social networking (i.e. MySpace) -- business networking (i.e. LinkedIn) -- homepage (i.e. Google pages) -- blog (i.e. blogger) -- message boards (i.e. hashkafah) -- calendar (i.e. Google calendar) -- picture repository (i.e. Flickr) -- movie rental (i.e. Netflix)

Should anyone who stumbles on one of these be able to trace me all the way through? Right now, I don't think even my friends could do it. Should there be 2 distinct personas - the personal, and the professional, and never shall the twain meet? I'm getting increasingly aware of online privacy issues... not that I can do much about it except keep my accounts separate, and where possible, restrict access (private posts, private pictures, etc).

Link: (Video) Photo Fraud in Lebanon

Photo Fraud in Lebanon

Link: Arabs for Israel

Arabs for Israel

A very unexpected find.

Goodbye KOTOR

Last night I finished Knights of the Old Republic. This is the first game I ever played on the "new" consoles (not counting SNES). Alex suggested I play this since he loved it and thought I would as well. He watched, and only occasionally helped me out (like 2 or 3 times total).

It's a great game, and highly recommended for Star Wars fans. I'm still behind the times of course, since KOTOR II has been out for a while now. Now that it's done, I don't know what to play (if anything). They don't really make games for nerdy couples to play together. Tetris and Mario Kart don't count. I mean a game that's story-based, not a dumb first-person shooter. I don't really want a MMP on-line game either like SW Galaxies or WOW. Those don't have enough structure or story line.

Alright... /nerdiness

vacation's where I wanna be...

Alex and I have been back from vacation for 2 weeks now, so it's a good time to recap our week in cali as an attempt to relive the fun.

We flew into San Jose and stayed in the Bay area for the first half of the week. We met up with lots of our friends who now live in the area. We made it up to San Francisco for a few hours.

We spent most of our time at Ghirardelli Square, but hopped off the bus on the way back to the CalTrain to walk around the Sony Metreon. Unfortunately, this caused us to miss the CalTrain we were aiming for, so we got to spend another 40 mins at the Metreon. That's ok, because we enjoyed the view of downtown SF.

We got back to Silicon Valley and met up with all our friends for an amazing sushi dinner. I've never seen so many creative, colorful and delicious rolls. We must have ordered 12 or 13 rolls, but since there were 7 of us, it came out pretty cheap per person.

That Monday we had lunch at Google which was awesome. It reminded me of Cornell with the different stations and all-you-can-eat style gorging. hehe. Employees were riding around campus on electric scooters, and half of the people we saw in the cafeteria were guests.

Tuesday we had lunch at Yahoo! and got to see some of what my friend does there. Lunch was also good, and not as busy and chaotic as Google.

Intermission: I can't read a map. Alex was driving the rental car the whole time (due to my being <25), style="font-style: italic;">tiny! It only had about 6 gates, and the runways were so short, that the landing/take-off process was very fast and abrupt.

From there, we took a van down to the Hyatt in Huntington Beach for a few days of relaxation. The hotel is right on the beach, but also had a large pool with several spa pools, restaurants, etc...

Rant! In NorCal, we stayed at Country Inn & Suites, which is a medium quality hotel (not a Super 8, but not a Hyatt). There, we had free wireless internet in the room, an Aeron chair (fancy, expensive, ergonomic desk chair), and free breakfast. At the Hyatt, which cost more than 4x what we paid at CIS, we also had to pay $10/day for internet, absurd amounts of money for the simplest of meals, and the chairs were your average desk chair. If they're already gouging you on the room rate (and $14/day hotel "activity" fee for your ability to use the pool and other hotel amenities), is it too much to ask to get free internet? I guess so. Room service lets you order an 8oz mini bottle of coke for $4. OR you can get the regular 16 oz at the vending machine down the hallway for $1.10. I can't believe they get away with this stuff!

The hotel itself was nice. It was great to lay out on the beach listening to the waves crash against the shore, getting a little bit of the mist spray. It was too cold to swim in the ocean though. I made it in to my ankles, Alex got in to his shoulders... trying to make me look like a whimp I guess.

(more pics can be found on Flickr)

The Hyatt runs a wedding/conference assembly line. There was always a meeting or wedding ceremony going on in the main courtyard. Every time I wanted to cross the courtyard to get to the beach or to another area, I felt I was intruding on someone's event. It was a bit awkward, but at the same time, obviously not my fault.

Alison's wedding on Saturday was beautiful. The ceremony was held in the central courtyard and of course the whole time, people had to walk around it to get back from the beach/to the beach. I know how they felt! Anyway.. the sky was a cloudless, crisp blue; the couple looked great and were very happy. The reception was delicious hehe. There was something called a "dollar dance" at the end, which I'd never heard of. For $1, anyone can dance with the bride or groom. Unfortunately, I only had $20s on me, so I had to skip the dance.

Sunday morning we flew back to Pittsburgh. Sigh. Good vacation... sucks to be back.