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And what an eventful trip it was.

In no particular order of annoyance:

• One thing about the City of Angels that I didn’t get: public transport sucks, and it sucks real big time. The city was apparently designed with the assumption that everyone living in the region has a car, and therefore doesn’t really need more than a token presence of buses. The one thing that LA really has going for it is its Metro train system, which is really new and smooth (I had almost forgotten what it was like to have a smooth train ride). But even that is woefully inadequate to get from Point A to Point B from anywhere outside the major tourist attractions.
• Went swimming at Venice Beach. It was less crowded than at Santa Monica (at least, near the pier) and the water was so inviting that I couldn’t resist just jumping in, despite not having brought a towel. The water was deliciously cold; subsequently, I probably consumed more salt in the next two hours than in the previous year. Ah, the salty tang of the sea breezes. And the lingering fart-like smell of angel sewage. Mmm.
• My friend’s roommate decided that she wanted a bacon sandwich and was in a hurry to do so, so she apparently slapped the bacon on a large wok at maximum heat and rushed to do her daily ablutions. When she was done there was smoke pouring furiously out of the stovetop and staining the entire kitchen wall. Which wouldn’t have been too bad if it didn’t trip the sprinkler system, showering the entire apartment ankle-deep in water and frying my notebook computer in the process. And to add insult to injury, there was loads of water damage to dozens of textbooks, including a library book I brought with me. Boo. On top of that, the wall-to-wall carpeting was completely soaked down to the floorboards; apparently their neighbor downstairs complained that their roof was dripping. After three days, the carpet developed nice brown mildew rings and stank like salted fish stored in sweaty socks. I had to sleep with that aroma for three nights. Estimated cost of damage replacement: $6,000. Which will make it by far the most expensive piece of bacon ever fried, by my knowledge.
• My camera’s zoom assembly decided to fall apart mysteriously, jamming itself during shutdown. Now it gives “Focus Error”. Dammit, that’s going to be another $175 spent on a $299 camera. Do you think it’s worth spending the extra $175 as opposed to getting a new camera? I’ve already paid for it to be fixed, once, for a similar problem at that price.
• LA traffic is horrendous. The 30-mile trip from Pasadena to Westwood Village takes over an hour each way.
• Undergrads picking grad school based on how cute their professors were, how prestigious the departments were, and doing research knowing that all they do is walk into lab, mix up a bunch a stuff, and leave the cleaning and workup to the grad students. ‘Nuff said.

I have a three week backlog of work to do, and hundreds of new ideas to parse through, thanks to the conference. Thankfully Tuesday night’s thunderstorm managed to dissipate the 115°F (46°C) hot air pocket that was hanging around the Midwest for the past week or so, and actually bring the temps back down to a sensible level, otherwise I might have had to resort to sleeping in the lab just to stay sane.

I’m so glad I didn’t choose to go to Caltech. Those crazy buggers.

Sorry for the ether silence, the conference just ended and there’s been a massive backlog of interesting stuff to wrap up as far as research is concerned. That, and a few more moments of excitement, will have to wait though.

It scared me though, to log into Bloglines after it’s back up (and after a solid week of conference work listening, talking and networking), only to realize that I have close to a thousand blog posts and RSS news items to read. Goddammit, now I realize how unproductive I’ve been by keeping up with all this reading. Sorry guys, but this list has gotta be trimmed soon. No hard feelings.

LifeHacker is awesome though: Check out this real life story of a person who evaded a traffic violation conviction by using Google Maps to present evidence in front of a judge. Edwin of Gear Live lives to tell his tale.

I should change my time accounting status from ‘vacation’ to ’sabbatical’. Came here to LA early due to my cheap ticket and ended up bumming in the Caltech library doing work and ssh-ing into my research cluster. (Except I didn’t do my chores of fixing down computer nodes, heh heh.)

The good thing about working on campus is the free A/C and wireless internet access. It’s so incredibly hot here, it’s even warmer than in Singapore, although not so humid, thankfully. And the weather back in corn-land is so nice some more. Aiyah.

Got to update myself on online movements; Agagooga kindly provided me with news about the NKF-SPH lawsuit. And noticed, somewhat amusedly, that NKF has become a pretty hot Technorati search term. Last I checked, it hit the #1 spot and has been there since 0830h PST. The pictures here speak for themselves, don’t they?

I would write more, but I’m hungry now.

Going for a conference in the City of Angels. Forecast for the next fortnight: light humor with occasional postings.

And before I say ta, check out beenmapped.com - Bookmark the Earth! Just about everyone in a major metropolitan area all over the worls has gone ga-ga over Google’s free satellite pictures. I didn’t realize how much the Forbidden City looked like a computer motherboard from outer space. And check out the Nevada desert in particular, it’s apparently home to all sorts of “weirdness”, such as this mysterious sun symbol. And this nearby Arizona tribute to Oprah Winfrey. Yow!
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P.S. I’ve just discovered the marriage between Google Maps and the New York City subway map, hosted onNYturf. Way cool! « LifeHacker