Last night, my father thought it would be a good idea to check out the services the Crystal Cathedral were putting on for Christmas Eve. Off the bat that has to sound strange. Four Hindus going to check out the Reader’s Digest version of a Christianity. Boy, was that place strange. If you ever remenber seeing that white headed guy who preaches the love of Jesus on TV (around the world!), that is the place we were at. In the middle of the ceremony (if that’s what you can call it), Dr. Schuller’s son (Dr. Schuller himself), promited the church’s web site, HourOfPower.org as a site to go and “get your last minute Christmas shopping done.” To top of the ridiclousness, outside in the parking lot, there was a section marked off for the “In-Car Worship Center.”
December 2002
I mentioned before that I’ve been working on the DotGNU project. It’s fun stuff, and all you other peoples out there should too. I’ve recently been finishing the implementation of the System.IO namespace, particularly in the File and Directory classes (exciting Internal Calls!). I’m currently trying to get the File.Copy complete and the File/Directory.SetAccessTime, SetModificationTime, etc methods all written. The DotGNU/Portable.NET team is trying to get their 0.5.0 release by early January, so there’s a lot of work to do for ECMA compliance.
You know, life is very hard. So very hard. I’m hanging out right now in my hotel room in the Ritz Carlton in Pasedena, waiting and relaxing until I go to dinner at the resturant here. After which, I’ll be going to an LA Kings hockey game. All on Microsoft’s dime. Why you may ask? Well, I’m at the Microsoft Research Univerity Relations California retreat, and this is where we’re hanging out. It’s a good time, and the Ritz is like a palace. Something straight out of a movie. Last night, I thought it would be cool to go have a drink at the bar at the Ritz, so I head down there at around 11PM after watching the Lakers lose and some TV. I must have been the youngest guy there by at least 5 years, not to mention the only guy there wearing denim. After looking at the Martini list (which started at $10), I ordered one, made some small talk with some people around me and then got the hell out of there. Very odd. I was so suprised to see at 11PM that the place was bumping.
I picked up the new Talib Kweli album, Quality and I must say it is amazingly quality. The tracks Rush and Good To You (which features a beat based on Nina Simone’s Sinner Man) are incredibly hard hitting and in your face. I need to get his first effort, Reflection Eternal and Blackstar as well. I had no idea this vien of hip-hop was so good.
An amusing study from my abnormal psychology class:
An average-looking male/female went up to students of the opposite sex asked them the following questions:
- “Would you like to have coffee with me?”
20% of male subjects said yes
75% of female subjects said yes - “Would you like to have coffee at your house?”
50% of male subjects said yes
35% of female subjects said yes - “Would you like to sleep with me?”
90% of male subjects said yes
5% of female subjects said yes
After reading us these numbers, our Professor quipped saying how all the men in the class were thinking “so I only need to ask 20 girls…”
This has been on very interesting weekend. It started on Friday night with a reception at the Chancellor’s house that I attened as a guest of Ami for the Student Foundation. It was, quite literally, a gathering of the who’s-who of San Diego. I met Irwin Jacobs (founder/CEO of Qualcomm), Chancellor Robert Dynes, the new dean of the School of Pharmacy and the new dean for the new School of Management, Duane Roth (CEO of Alliance Pharmaceutical) and some other people who I can’t even remember. It was pretty funny when I met Irwin Jacobs: he had just entered the room, and I pretty much acosted him as soon as I noticed who he was. He must have been pretty flumoxed since I caught him off guard, but he was a nice man.
After that good time, the Lakers came back for an amazing victory against Dallas. Amazing. Then a couple of friends and I went downtown to Martini Ranch to kick back and go dancing. Pretty much a whirlwind day, which was followed the next day by hours and hours of homework and projects.
More recently I’ve been working porting Portable.NET (part of the DotGNU project) to the mingw platform. More on that once I get somewhere with it.
I found this hilarious site today called GoogleFight. It’s pretty ridiclious. You type in two words or phrases (e.g. AOL and Microsoft) and it chooses a winner based on how many results Google finds.