Tonight marks the first time in about three weeks that i've allowed my mind to wander to regions where work is no longer in sight. Whew.

When was the last time i wrote something here? Geez, January 26? Two weeks? What witty repartee has been lost forever because i didn't make it to fac13 in time to record it for posterity? We'll never know. When was January 26? The week before the Super Bowl? Ah yes ... the Stanford Radiation Oncology retreat was held on campus (not such a long distance to retreat) on Friday and Saturday. The Thursday prior i was up until 4:30am getting the latest version of my grant written, working while the Michael J. Fox vehicle The Secret of My Success played on cable. Probably the third or fourth time i'd seen that old flick that month. I slept until 9am on Friday morning, then headed in to work to solicit more comments on the grant. The retreat began at 1:30pm, and i had yet to begin preparing the two talks i was scheduled to give Saturday afternoon. I made an effort to listen to the biology talks on Friday, but sat in the back so i could work on my laptop without calling too much attention to myself. Turns out i can now connect to the Stanford wireless network, so i got a lot done. By 6pm however my body was crying foul, so i passed on the retreat dinner at Su Hong and headed home.

Saturday i did some much needed sleeping in, but made it to Stanford by 10am to finalize my talks then head over to the meeting. My afternoon imaging and physics session went well, but to be honest i was just glad things were over. You see, by this point in my grant preparation i was routinely staying up past two and consuming a pot of coffee every evening around 10:30pm.

Because apparently i am a huge masochist, i somehow made the fairly ridiculous decision to get up at 7am Sunday morning to drive to Gilroy. Why? To get a Wii at Wal-Mart. Yes, the same Wii that i've been saying for weeks i don't care about. Blame it on the sleep deprivation. I arrived in the garlic capital at 8am, the time at which i'd been told the Wii's would go on sale. No big lines outside, looks good. No big lines at the electronics counter, also good. However when i posed the pivotal question to the clerk, i was told they'd sold out of them at 11:30pm the night before. Damn 24 hour store. Driving home past the outlets i wanted to stop to pick up some new running shoes, but of course it was only 8:15am and the stores wouldn't be open for another few hours. Well, that was useless.

Monday was d-day for the grant, which by this point (another 2am session Sunday night) was mostly complete. However my research process manager told me i could submit it to her on Tuesday morning, which actually annoyed me a bit since i was all set to get this thing away from me. I filled out the assortment of poorly-implemented electronic forms and had a leisurely read-through that afternoon. Tuesday morning the 100 page document was gone. I'm happier with this application than the R01 i put in last summer, so we'll see how it goes. That other one is going to be rewritten and resubmitted come June. Something to look forward too. Unfortunately i had a variety of other work things to attend to, so i couldn't just take the rest of the week off. Interviews, meetings, journal clubs, yadda yadda yadda. Siestas sound nice. Maybe i'll take V's advice and move us to Spain.

I've been grabbing new music as usual, but the specific acquisitions somehow are less interesting to me at the moment than the fact that i'm only 1400 songs away from 50,000.

I tried to curb my coffee addiction the following day, but was rewarded with a massive headache for my cold turkey attempts. This malady was compounded by the fact that my new 17" LCD monitor arrived at work on Monday, which i planned to coordinate with my existing 17" display to get the dual monitor thing going. That went fine from a technical standpoint, but teaching my brain to handle two displays induced further headaches and a good deal of dizziness and nausea. I adapted within a few days, but it took some of the shine off my post-grant destressing.

On a techie aside, the dual monitor setup rocks. I can work on Word on one screen and Powerpoint on the other, have iTunes running full screen on one, and generally optimize many of my work flows. In other geek news i finally gave my long-neglected copy of Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 a whirl. I picked up a copy of Teach Yourself Visual Basic in 24 Hours and found it was much less daunting than i had built up in my head. Within three days i'd written a VB application embodying my iTunes log program. I subsequently upgraded to Visual Studio 2005 and am now adding assorted bells and whistles to the software. Very cool. Maybe i'll now finally learn C as well. I'd love to get my hands on the iTunes plugin SDK, but according to various message boards you have to get a license for it from Apple. I don't think telling them "i want to play with it" will be convincing enough.

Last weekend was Super Bowl time, and i had arranged to have a few Stanford chums over to watch the big game. Fred had intrigued me with his descriptions of the wonder of deep fried turkey, and i had said we should cook one together sometime, so the Super Bowl became sometime. In addition, i shopped Saturday and Sunday mornings for other assorted food and stocked the kitchen with a variety of deli meats and cheeses, chips, soda, and beer. In order to get enough sleep to be capable of cleaning the house Sunday morning, i left V in the city on Saturday night after an evening at the tenth anniversary of Leisure. She headed over to New Wave City with Gary and Naomi while i came home to get my beauty sleep and comfort the lonely dog.

My Super Bowl plans were complicated by the issues inherent in cooking a turkey. Fred, Amanda, and Ethan arrived with the fryer at 2pm, and began setting up the huge vat and cooker in the driveway. I had neglected to check my BBQ propane tank and we learned it was near empty, so i had to drive around for a half hour until i found a U-Haul that could fill it for me. We therefore didn't get the oil boiling until 3:15pm, a scant 15 minutes before game time. I had also failed to appreciate that unless i was interested in burning the house down, it was probably not a good idea to leave the turkey cooking on its own for the hour it required. Which meant someone was going to have to watch the fryer and miss the first quarter or more of the game. But in the spirit of improvisation, i grabbed the TV in the garage's rumpus room and some coaxial and power extension cables so it could be set up on the driveway. My careful preparation of the living room for football revelers was for naught as our friends wound up collecting on the driveway. It was a very chill party, with football mixed with conversation and food in a laid-back fashion. After the turkey was done, Fred fried some wings that we subsequently dowsed in either honey barbecue or Frank's red hot sauce. Those were fabulous, easily the dish of the event. Although little Ethan was suffering through a stomach bug and Tara pestered everyone in her attempts to grift some food, the party was a success. Fred even got to see his hometown Indianapolis Colts win their much-deserved first championship of the Peyton Manning era.

In overseas sports, since their 2-nil taming by rivals Liverpool my Blues have reeled off a few wins in the FA Cup, League Cup, and Premiership, including a 3-nil drubbing of the Blackburn bruisers. However, every time we come up with a resounding triumph it seems Manchester United trumps us, producing a 4-nil victory over Watford on the same day. Anything you can do, we can do better. It's hard to deny that Ronaldo, Rooney, Giggs, and co. are dazzling their pursuers these days, and as i've said before Chelsea are looking second best. The Michael Ballack and Andriy Shevchenko experiments appear decided failures (i remain hopelessly optimistic about the Ukrainian, however), and the injuries keep piling up. Ah well. As with most of my other leisure activities of late, football has been towards the back of my mind. Even David Beckham coming to L.A. can't get me excited. Don't even get me started.

My brain had seemingly not gotten enough of the work late, OD on caffeine lifestyle, because due to sheer procrastination i neglected to prepare the materials for my first of two consecutive bioE 222B lectures by Sunday night. I therefore arose at 4:45am Monday morning so i could get to work and have things ready by the 9am class time. All went well, but by that afternoon's 3pm MIPS seminar i was dead. Home to sleep.

The rest of my work week was occupied readying for my Friday lecture. I also laid out a plan of attack for the rest of the spring, as grant writing always seems to help me prioritize my academic efforts. V and i made it up to the city for a long overdue rendez-vous with Jenz at Betelnut on Wednesday evening, allowing us to catch up over dragon dumplings and firecracker calamari.

I haven't been playing much Xbox 360 these days. I've tried to return to Rainbow Six: Vegas on a few occasions, but have gotten frustrated at my first death and turned it off within five minutes. I'm sure i'll return to my video addiction once i calm down a bit more following my work odyssey. I was all juiced to get my hands on the latest edition of Winning Eleven, the even more cumbersomely monikered Winning Eleven Pro Evolution Soccer 2007. However reviews of the new release, while asserting that the Konami series remains the best soccer game on the market, have been decidedly mediocre. Apparently for the third or fourth year running the game is basically the same. Doh. Maybe Crackdown or Lost Planet will draw me out of my gaming doldrums.

I've made a few recent eBay purchases, including a long sleeve Ronaldinho Barcelona jersey (including shorts, which is an amusing bonus but i can't imagine wearing them), a nifty although probably bootlegged Ian Curtis t-shirt showing three shots of his silhouette doing his characteristic dance, and a reprint of a Peter Saville Factory Records poster that is currently being framed for display in my office. I also bought a copy of Designed by Peter Saville from Amazon, which displays the iconic designer's work nicely but is not quite as engrossing as the Complete Factory Records Graphic Album. I just received the jersey on Saturday, and it turns out it's fake. $12 and from China? Probably not good signs. It's a reasonable facsimile however, so i'll hang on to it. No positive feedback though.

I like mushrooms. The regular kind, you delinquents.

This whole Aqua Teen Hunger Force bomb scare incident strikes me as absolutely ridiculous. Granted i'm a fan of the show so when i saw the LED-laden devices, distributed around several metropolitan cities as a guerrila marketing tactic, i knew what they were. Many others however saw a circuit board with wires and immediately thought of marauding terrorists planting bombs. Is this the society we live in now? It's a cartoon character flipping the bird! Does that sound like an Al Qaeda operation? Boston mayor Thomas Menino threw a literal fit following the episode, claiming the city spent a million dollars responding to the "threat" and demanding that Turner Broadcasting, the parent company of personal fave Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, cover the costs. Turner obliged, but if anyone came out looking stupid it was those who misinterpreted cartoon ads as weapons of mass destruction, not the people who put on an underground advertising campaign. The press conference of the two Adult Swim guys arrested for planting the devices was a perfect riposte. I'm now enjoying observing the variety of real and fake devices for sale for thousands of dollars on eBay.