New posts to fac13 have been few and far between due to my work schedule of late. When i go to meetings, i often find myself taking a sort of punctuated vacation, watching lots of Law & Order and doting on my website between sessions. Not this time ... i spent my time in Minneapolis hob nobbing and surveying the state of medical physics. I actually did watch a fair bit of L&O, but instead of doing web things on my laptop while guessing Jack McCoy's next move, i was adding features to my über-image analysis tool RT_Image. My new Indie Elevator site has languished unattended since i registered the domain, although i have made a couple of sketches of how i'd like it to be laid out that are awaiting transformation into cyber-reality.

I got an email from the Chelsea megastore a few weeks back relating that i can now purchase their horrifically ugly neon yellow away kit. However, buried in that email was an intriguing reference to a new Adidas Chelsea Samba. I checked it out and was very impressed with the "Chelsea Samba Millenium", and ordered two pairs. I brought one with me to L.A. and subsequently Minneapolis, and it is now my favorite shoe. Hee.

One of the non-academic reasons for my lackadaisical reporting of late has been the laundry list of tasks waiting to be performed at home. This list includes, but is by no means limited to:

• Finish painting the trim in our newly refloored and repainted bedroom,
• Install a new electrical and cable outlet in the bedroom to accomodate the new TV location,
• Move our bedroom furniture from its temporary residence in the living room and garage back to its proper location,
• Install a network outlet in the back of the house to create an out-of-the-way place to house our assorted network hardware and desktop PC,
• Plan and implementing an Airtunes network using the Airport Express given to my for my birthday by Arlene, Alan, and Ana,
• And refinish the rest of the hardwood floors, put in a new bathroom tub, floors, and sink, build a second bedroom and bathroom, dig a pool, etc etc ...

The rest of my time in Minneapolis wasn't especially thrilling. I attempted to hook up with A³, but i didn't have time to drive the three hours down to Iowa and due to Ana's summer camp they were unable to take a day to drive up. Oh well. On my last night there i went to a Brazilian steakhouse with some of my colleagues. They advertise those things all over the inflight magazines, but i had never been to one before. It's all-you-can-eat, and gauchos wander through the dining room with pieces of meat on spits, carving some off for you if you've set your tabletop card to the green face. When you're full, you turn the card to its red side. Which you find you have to do fairly quickly as otherwise your plate becomes a hulking pile of meat. I returned home on Thursday evening, just beating the thunderstorms in Minneapolis and spending my flight coding a dicom tag editor in IDL and listening to Iron Maiden on my iPod.

No rest for the wicked as after a brief reintroduction to my office at Stanford on Friday, i met up with Kevin and Shyoko (up for the weekend from L.A.) as well as Veronica to go see Daft Punk in Berkeley. I successfully lobbied for a pre-show Top Dog, which of course meant we missed the first 10 minutes of openers the Rapture, further emphasizing V's dislike of the anarchist Berkeley sausage establishment. After the show the four of us got a late dinner at Sparky's in the city before heading home to collapse. While V had to work on Saturday, i took the SoCal folks for breakfast at Bob's Courthouse Restaurant in RC. We then collected Veronica and did some shopping. Kevin and Shyoko drove off to the city for a few hours while V and i recharged our batteries, grabbing another late night dinner at Tarboosh upon reconnoitering. On Sunday we tagged along with K+S to search for egg custard cups in Chinatown. Turns out we picked a lousy day to go to SF, as traffic was jammed because of Barry Bonds's continuing quest for the home run record as well as the Folsom Street Fair. We managed to get to Chinatown in a reasonable amount of time, but found our bakery of choice was closed. We settled for decent dim sum at a hole-in-the-wall joint. That evening i brought my Xbox over to Stanford chum Sandip's house for a long-overdue gaming session, in which i performed well at NBA 2K7 but got my clock cleaned by Fred in Madden 2007. My Patriots offense couldn't handle the blitz, and my defense could not break up the Manning-to-Harrison connection.

Unfortunately my breakneck pace finally caught up with me on Sunday night, as i succumbed to the first stages of a head cold. However, in what must be yet another sign of my maturity, i forced myself to go to work on Monday and Tuesday because of prior commitments. On Wednesday i could've afforded to take a day off, but my illness had abated by then. Being responsible blows.

This new trend of sing-along game shows is awful. Both variants (Don't Forget the Lyrics and the Singing Bee) are endlessly repetitive exercises in nitpicking. "Oh, i'm sorry. You sang "She's got a ticket to ride, and she don't care." The actual lyric is "She's got a ticket to ride, but she don't care." Too bad." A few weeks back, favorite pop-culture review show The Soup skewered host Joey Fatone and the ridiculous last round intro consisting of a cheesy rendition of Europe's "The Final Countdown". The next week, Fatone exuded a "this is so silly" vibe during the same segment. Way to rise above public criticism, dude.