Things that might be decidedly odd…

Drunks

I stumbled across this list in a comment to a slog post.

Apparently King County (the county where Seattle and most of its surrounding suburbs like Redmond are located) is #12 on this list of counties with the highest percentage of residents who have drunk alcohol in the past month. It’s by far #1 on the west coast and #1 for counties with populations more than one million residents. Weird.

Most of the counties on the list are located in the northeast with a smattering through the rust belt and mountain west. No counties in California made the list, but another county I once lived in made the list. Orange County, NC which contains Chapel Hill and Carrboro is #57 or #1 in the south.

Happy Birthday to Me

It’s my birthday! Well, at least on the east coast where I’m currently located. Technically, I wasn’t born until around 8:30am PDT. I won’t say how old, but less than 30 and more than 25. Those who need to know, know I guess.

I’m planning to grab dinner and drinks with my NC peeps tonight. Should be fun, especially after a long day of talking to prospective employees for 6 hours. The career fair tonight went well (as did my talk earlier in the day), but of course people are nice to you when you hold the prospect of a job, a free xbox and other random giveaways.

Arrival in Chapel Hill

I just had one of the strangest things happen to me in a hotel ever. I couldn’t get my optical mouse to work on my laptop because there were no non-shiny surfaces in the room! I somehow managed to find a magazine with a slightly less glossy surface which seems to be doing the trick. I guess that’s just what comes with the territory of a nice hotel, although it would have been nice if they had planned for that eventuality and included a complementary mouse pad or something.

My trip today went relatively smoothly. The first plane was about 30 minutes late, but I (and my luggage) still made the connection. Unfortunately, the shortened connection meant I didn’t have time to eat dinner in Salt Lake City. After picking up my luggage (damn no liquids rule–although it was nice not dragging all my luggage around the airport like I usually do), getting my rental car and checking into the hotel, I went to the only place open for dinner at this hour–Time Out.

For those who don’t know, it’s somewhat of a Chapel Hill and UNC institution. It’s a 24-hour fast Southern food joint. When the bars close on Friday or Saturday night, the place gets packed, the police show up and the whole place becomes rather ghetto. However, nobody at that point cares, because they’re all drunk and in need of late night munchies. It was pretty tame tonight, but at least I have some food in my stomach now. I got some fried chicken, fried okra and mashed potatos. I had to pass on the biscuit and sweet tea lest I totally eat too much bad for you goodness.

North Carolina Bound

For those who haven’t heard, I’m going to be in Chapel Hill at the end of next week on a recruiting trip for Microsoft. I’m going to represent the company at the annual fall career fair and also at the diversity night (need to get a rainbow button or something for that). I’ll also be in town for my birthday (the 21st) and will have to go out on the town like old times or something. I also kind of want to go to Trailer Park Prize Night at Flex since I never got to go when I was still living in North Carolina. I suppose it’s my hot birthday and I’ll do what I want. (:

Camp and More Travel

Well, it looks like I will be going to CAMP this year after all. I paid my money, but I still need to pick up a couple of items before I leave on Friday. On one hand, I really need a weekend where I’m not traveling all over creation and being busy, busy, busy but this only happens once a year so I thought I’d give it a try. Maybe next weekend I’ll be able to chill out. I believe I’m going camping two weekends from now.

For those who I haven’t told yet, I’m probably going to be in Chapel Hill the weekend around my birthday (probably 9/20-24) on a recruiting trip for work.

Whew, it’s been a busy summer and it doesn’t seem to be letting up any time soon.

NC to Alexandria

I did get on my flight to Chicago on time and in first class. However, it was about 1.5 hours late which caused me to miss my connection. I then got rebooked onto a 4pm flight that was supposed to get me into Raleigh at 7pm, but I managed to luck out and get onto an earlier flight through standy. I really didn’t think I was going to be able to get on when they made an announcement requesting 3 volunteers to get bumped 20 minutes before departure. In the end, I think at least one or two large groups missed their connection or otherwise didn’t show up because I heard “final boarding call …. X party of 4 … Y party of 5″ a few times before they started calling standby names. By 12:30 I was on the ground in Raleigh–about 20 hours after my original planned arrival time or 29 hours after arriving at SeaTac (the first time).

After picking up my rental car at the airport, I met up with Steve and John over at Panera in Durham to make some conversation and grab a very late lunch. I went back to Steve’s aftewards and took a much needed 2 hour nap before heading over to Mellow Mushroom in Durham at the American Tobacco Project for pizza with everybody I had originally planned to eat lunch with that day. Here’s a pic Steve took of everybody:

From there, we went to . Nobody we knew won anything, but Aaron, Brad and I got our picture taken with the MC Mary K. Mart. She’s scarier in pictures I think, but in that Divine/West Virginia sort of a way:

My fourth major social event of the evening was my fashionaby late appearance at a CS grad student party at Tynia, Mike, Todd and Sasa’s house. I got to talk to just about everybody I wanted to see, which was awesome. At 2:30, I left the party to crash at Sarah and Jason’s. It must have been 3am by the time I went to bed. I slept until 1pm and still felt a bit groggy when I got up. I hadn’t slept more than 2 or 3 hours at a time for several days. The three of us and Jeff T went for a very late brunch (if you could even call it that) at Elmo’s in Carrboro just like old times.

Upon arriving back at Jason and Sarah’s, Jason and I played this board game Carcassonne. Even with just two players, it worked quite well. It was both simple and fun, unlike a lot of other board games out there today. I need to pick up a copy some time. I ended up sticking around for dinner (yummy eggplant parmesian) there with Nico and Jeff T eventually joining us too.

I took off for DC around 9pm and got to the hotel here in Alexandria around 1:30 or so. The first room they put me in wasn’t really complete. The pillows were laying on the beds in a pile without covers. The guy at the front desk didn’t seem to believe me for some reason, but he gave me another room anyways.

I just finished up putting the final touches on my slides. Tomorrow, my plan is to get up, eat some breakfast, practice my talk and then give my talk. Hopefully, I can grab lunch with some people I know from UNC and/or MPI before heading back to Chapel Hill later in the day.

Relief

A couple days ago I mentioned that I needed to start getting my travel arrangements for IEEE VR together, which would mean contacting my former advisor. This morning, she beat me to the punch and sent me an email about it instead. I confirmed some of the details of my travel plans and a rough budget was agreed upon. More importantly though, I brought up the nasty email exchange that happened in December. I apologized, she apologized and I think we’re back on good terms. It’s quite a relief to have worked that out as I really did not want to end my graduate school experience on such a sour note.

My talk is scheduled on Monday March 27th at 11am. My tentative plan is to take red-eye to DC on Thursday night and then get to Chapel Hill (probably by plane) the next morning OR take an early flight Friday morning and arrive in North Carolina that evening. That would give me Friday and Saturday to see people and do things. Sunday night or Monday morning, I’d return to DC, give my talk, spend the night there and return to Seattle by Tuesday night.

Room for Rent

Well, I posted ads all over the place for somebody to take over my lease since I’m moving to Seattle. Check out the version I posted on craigslist here for more info.

Being Social

Today I didn’t get much work done. I had intended to go to campus to do some work in Mathematica (I don’t have a copy on my machines at home). However, there was a football and basketball game today on campus, which meant there would be nowhere to park. Hence, I decided to just take the day off.

I did some laundry and had dinner with my friend Steve at Tyler’s in Carrboro. From there, I came home to browse the web. I ran across this odd site, 43things.com. It seems to be very popluar in Seattle. I stumbled across it through its work for microsoft category. An interesting new way to waste time I suppose.

After that, I went out to Top of the Hill to meet some friends. We hung out there for a while before heading over to Hell, where we finished the night. Since I was planning to drink a bit, I walked into town, but fortunately Steven was able to give me a ride back home. It was a pretty good night out really. I had some great conversations with several people about all kinds of interesting goings on in their lives and my life.

Night Out

Last night, I called up Mike to see if he was planning to do anything being that it was Friday night. I met up with him and Andy at Goldie’s pretty late (probably around midnight). Eventually Brad, Tim and Jeff T ended up there too. It’s been a while since I’ve gone out to the bars in Chapel Hill. I guess it’s just that mid-semester funk or something. We had a pretty good time drinking, talking and complaining about the loud cover band in the corner.

The most memorable conversation I had was with Brad, where we both sorta bitched about lack of available romantic interests in a departmentally driven social life. Straight women and gay men are both a rarity in Computer Science departments.

Last night was one of the coldest evenings we’ve had so far (got down to 34F in Chapel Hill I think) this season. It was the first time since probably March where I wore a wool sweater, winter coat and warm hat since I decided to walk to downtown instead of drive. After leaving Goldie’s not too far from closing, we headed over to Time Out for some late night eats. I had a biscuit and mash potatos, for which I still owe Jeff T $1 (written proof so I don’t forget).