die gitarre und deutsch

saturday i met katja again for speaking german. this time i went to geneva, and after we had a nice lunch, we walked over to the music store that sean recommended to me, and after sampling quite a few, and waffling quite a bit, i eventually talked myself into buying one. it was a lot of money (400 francs for the guitar + 100 for the case), but i'm telling myself (at least for the moment) that i think it's probably worth at least close to that, and that if i sell it for a fair percentage of that when i leave switzerland, it will just turn out to have been like renting it cheaply, or something. and, it was made in spain, which i think is cool (considering i think that's where they were originally invented, to say nothing of the fact that since i'm in europe, it'd be sorta silly to buy one from japan, or whatever). the ridiculously great part of the story is that i was so excited to have a new toy that i forgot my backpack in the store [rolls eyes]. katja went back today and picked it up for me, and will bring it to movienight tomorrow.

as it turned out, we didn't do a whole lot of speaking german, but we worked a few phrases in here and there. i'm learning slowly; the simple parts of the grammar are falling into place, but i still really need to find a way to bootstrap my vocabulary. if anyone has any secrets for accomplishing this, please let me know.

after the music store, we just kinda walked around for a while, and grabbed some gelato at a nice little place, even though it was drizzling (it's never too cold for ice cream!). then eventually i caught the train back to lausanne.

the risottofest with enno on thursday turned out rather well. apparently it was his "laundry day" (i guess most of the apartment buildings around here have this assinine system where each person only gets access to the machine for one day every three weeks or something ridiculous like that), so we relocated it to his house instead. made three different kinds: pumpkin, artichoke, and the one i cut out of the newspaper, which was with safran, a bunch of spices, and some flaming marsala, which was interesting. they all tasted good, and weren't even all that difficult to make. i'll have to start doing that from time to time, i think. he also suggested we might do something like that for one of the twin peaks nights at some point.

incidentally, we're going to be starting the twin peaks wednesdays back up this week. i don't think we'll jump immediately back into the series, but people will come over, i'll light up the bbbq, and maybe we'll pop in a movie or something. i'm hoping it will be fun. and speaking of television series, last week florence and xavier (my non-insane neighbors) went on their vacation to sicily, and i was going over periodically to take care of lulu the cat. anyway, they told me to feel free to borrow from their dvd collection while they were gone. so i let myself get sucked into watching the first season of "twenty-four." it was so over-dramatized that it's not even funny, and i'm still kinda kicking myself for how much i let it get me involved. it was an exciting trip, but in the end the experience was disturbingly like watching a science fiction film; it's great fun while it lasts, but then after it's over, you just kind feel dirty for having watched it, and moreso for having enjoyed it a little bit. anyway, about the cat, i really hate litterboxes. that is all.

yesterday, the sun came back, and i went running again. probably about 5km out, then a little rest, and 5km back. not much to speak of, in the big picture, i suppose, but baby steps in the right direction, right?

tonight, yannick and i are headed back to that yoga studio that we tried (and failed) to go to last week. i'm kinda looking forward to it. we'll see how it goes.

oh, and nidhi showed up today. she's a phd student from the robotics institute at cmu that's going to be spending about 4 months with us here at epfl. actually, she's taking over julien's old desk in my office. she seems pretty cool, but i don't know much about her yet.

sounds like i might go up flying with antoine tomorrow at around lunch time. no details yet.

rainclouds in august, and other such nonsense

i feel so distracted lately. and i really wish i knew why. or even just had a hunch, or the tiniest shred of an idea. but alas, i don't.

for the last several weeks, my ability to motivate myself to make progress at work has been pitiful at best. this is not helped by the fact that alcherio was on vacation, which has the dual effect of relieving stress in the short term (when the cat's away...) and increasing it in the long term---he's supposed to be back next week, and i feel like i should really have something spectacular to show him after three weeks of work. of course, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense either, since even had he been checking up on me each week like usual, the combination of three weeks of small advances still probably doesn't add up to anything particularly impressive, but i'm starting to get that uneasy queasy feeling in my stomach nonetheless, as his return draws closer. mostly, i think he'll just be very disappointed that we're not going to be able to make the submission deadlines at the beginning of september. we both knew it was a longshot, and not particularly likely (especially with him being gone), but we were still going to try, and it didn't really happen. maybe if i had worked my ass off, it might have been possible; but for whatever reason, i don't care enough about it to do that.

as if it wasn't obvious already, yes, i can feel myself sliding down into a depressive phase. and no, i haven't dragged my sorry ass to a psychiatrist yet either; i'm still too chicken. i know i need to, but i just can't bring myself to actually do it.

tuesday evening yannick and i tried to go to another yoga studio, and when we showed up, it was locked, and there wasn't anybody there. that was frustrating, but we went for a drink anyway, and talked for a while, which was nice, albeit not at all what we had planned. (hrmmm, replacing exercise with drinking beer; tempting, but not exactly what most people would call productive or healthy...) turns out, despite the fact that there was a class scheduled on the calendar, he doesn't let anyone show up cold for a non-beginner class, and he wasn't expecting any current students, so he didn't come. after talking to him on the phone yesterday, we're going to go back on monday for his beginning class, and then talk about what the appropriate level for us might be. more news after the fact.

learning german is proving to be an interesting experience. somehow, even though i know it can't have been more than a year and a half ago, i can no longer really remember or imagine what it was like to not understand [basically any] french. this is probably mostly to do with the fact that i still think my french sucks splintered telephone poles even now (which it does). but i at least understand the majority of what goes on around me. in german however, whoohboy. i've been writing all my emails to markus in broken german, and he's been cool enough to actually take the time to read, understand, and correct all of them. at the moment, i'm lucky if i get one sentence out of ten correct. it's a little disheartening, but mostly i'm starting to feel a little bad about taking so much of his time for him to bring me up to speed. that, and even if i get the writing down okay, it looks like the speaking will take much longer. since, when writing, i can put all the words out there on the page, and then rearrage them into the proper order. when speaking, you gotta get the order right from the beginning, or you're basically screwed. :) well, i'll still sticking at it, and hopefully it will snap into place sometime soon.

on a similar note, i'm going to geneva on saturday to meet with katja again, which should be fun as well as embarassing. while i'm there, i'm hoping to make it to the music store sean told me about where he got his guitar (a non-descript but nice, and more importantly, nice sounding classical) for cheap (chf150), and maybe i'll even buy one. that would be cool. i really do want to learn to play eventually.

seems i'm turning spendthrift in my old age. yesterday i ordered a gps pedometer/heartmonitor for running, because it was on sale for half price, and looked like a really cool toy. i've actually been wanting to get a heartrate monitor for a while, so it's not really that extreme, but in reality, i probably could have gotten one for around $50, instead of the $200 i spent on this fancy gadget. regardless, i think it's probably a good thing, since mom and dad had wanted to get me something for my birthday, and we didn't manage to find anything that would be reasonable for me to take over here while i was home. so they're going to chip in a little bit for this new toy. it still amazes me that i'm actually staying focused and motivated about my health for this long. i mean, truth be told, i'm actually probably bordering on obsession at this point. but if it works, i'm hardly going to complain. my filtered weight is continuing to fall steadily. if i can keep it up, i actually stand a decent chance of reaching my goal by the beggining of december. such a fascinating idea. i keep wondering if it's too much to hope for, or too good to be true, or something like that. but doing the math, and watching the numbers, it really looks possible... a body that i'm not so ashamed of; that would quite possibly be the best christmas gift i've ever received.

last night we had "movienight." this time antoine and jean-christophe showed photographs from their vacations (antoine went to vietnam with his family, and jcz went sailing the coast of croatia with his girlfriend and a few others). some very cool shots. of course the expensive cameras don't hurt any, but they must be pretty damn good photographers as well. and to try something new, we had a sort of makeshift baked potato bar for dinner. in the end it actually turned out well, and everybody seemed to like it just fine, but i was scared for a while when the potatoes weren't softening even after having been in the oven for nearly an hour and a half. probably they were just the wrong kind of potato, but at about two hours we hit a severe non-linearity, and they suddenly turned done. too bad i had only estimated that they would take around 30-45 minutes to prepare... [rolls eyes] and we made banana muffins and tea for dessert.

and since this journal entry is turning into a completely random free association session, speaking of food, enno is coming over tonight, and we'll try to make risotto. this'll be our first cooking night what seems like a _very_ long time. i hope we start doing it regularly again. i really enjoyed it, and i've kinda missed it. hey, come to think of it, the slowfood thing should be coming up pretty soon, too. i wonder if we'll go again this year. gonna have to check on that.

wet weekend

well, yesterday, we had fun in spite of the weather, even though it was really quite miserable. not the best choice for going hiking, but i really wanted to, and yannick seemed excited about it, so we went anyway. a spanish student named olivia who visiting their lab came with us as well. it was never raining hard, but we did get reasonably wet, and the lousy part was that by the time we got to the viewpoint, we were standing in the cloud, and visibility was like 15-20 meters. but like i said, it was fun to spend time with people. i had wanted to invite them back for dinner after, but as everyone was cold, wet, and tired, we just went our separate ways instead.

regardless, i was really glad we went, because we got to talk quite a bit, and filled in a lot of the getting-to-know-you details and stuff. he claimed it was because this was the first time we'd seen each other when we weren't drunk (which amused me, seeing as it's not technically true, since i seldom drink much, if anything, at markus's thursdays, but i didn't bother correcting him). so, yeah, just ordinary stuff, like two younger siblings (brother 13, sister 20), the ~5 years he lived in menlo park were around 1988-1994, before they moved back to france (lyon). he's mildly red/green colorblind, like me. his dad is some sort of protein biologist and has been working at epfl for about 10 years now, and so the rest of his family is currently relocating to lausanne. just details in the grand scheme of things, but i like learning about people. it's just fun for me, i guess.

saturday i wandered around a different area of town on my shopping trip, and found a neat little tea store where i talked to the lady for a while, tried a few, and eventually bought 50g of one (it was rather expensive, but i chalk it up to life experiences, meeting new and interesting people, and speaking to them in french). the brita filter i bought for the vodka experiment (i did write about that, didn't i? maybe i should go back and check) actually works really well for filtering the water before making tea. not sure why, since the tap water tastes fine to me unfiltered, but i guess some of the minerals react with the chemicals/extracts in the tea, and can sometimes cause it to taste funny.

i also bought another case fan for the computer, and it seems [knock on wood] to be slightly more happy now. and i don't know if i'm interpreting the output correctly, but i tried to configure lm_sensors so that i could check on the temperature in real time while the machine was running, and it says that the motherboard is running 10-15 degrees (centigrade) hotter than it should. i suspect this might be simply a calibration issue, though, since some of the voltage monitors show double or half what they should, and stuff like that.

jim, fabius, carol, and i played settlers on saturday night. i wonder if you can guess who won both games. hahahaha. (i'll give you a hint: his name starts with a "j" and he always wins everything.)

i should probably set a date for thanksgiving soon, so that i stand a chance of squeezing it onto people's calendars. maybe the sunday before the real thing this year? hrm. more news on this when it comes.

swarms and fireworks

just a quick update, since i'm on my way to bed.

yesterday, lunch + afternoon with katja was great. unlike the time with sandra, katja was actually very serious about helping me learn, and was really awesome about it. clearly, i'm not to the point where we could actually have a meaningful conversation yet, but whatever we were talking about, we would always pick a couple of single clause sentences and try to translate them into german and then dissect them. it was great. we had lunch in a nice restaurant across from the train station (jim recommended their pizzas, which were quite good), and then took a walk down by the lake before she caught her train to bern (she was headed home for the evening to celebrate her sister's 24th birthday).

then, i went with jim and fabius to geneva, where we had dinner at carol's new apartment, and then went to see the fireworks over the river/lake. **that** was **amazing.** never seen so many fireworks in my entire life. probably more than all the others i've seen combined. must have gone on for close to a solid hour, and not one at a time, either; we're talking full-on, non-stop barrage. unbelievable. if you ever get the chance to be in switzerland at the time of the "fete de geneve," the fireworks on the last day are definitely not to be missed. after some amount of confusion, we connected with nikolaus and olga, and got a ride back to lausanne with them (though by the time we got back, it was nearing 5am...).

naturally, then, i basically slept through this morning. nothing really happened today. just bumming around the apartment here, doing little menial things, like cleaning and such. this evening, we went over to jim's and saw "the swarm." he had gotten it through his new netflix clone here in switzerland. it's an old (1978) b-movie thriller about texas being overrun by hordes of killer bees from africa. the main character is a ludicrously young michael caine, who apparently must have gotten some _really_ good acting classes _after_ making this movie. his performance was so bad it was downright hilarious. anyway, we all (obviously) got a kick out of it, seeing as it's slightly (well, in name, at least) related to what we do. or rather, what the general public thinks we do (make monsters that kill people). old movies are fun.

a couple of the tomatoes are starting to change color. they're not red yet, but you can see the bright green color fading to something darker. still not sure if those palm/bulb things are going to survive or not. i guess i just have to keep watering them and waiting...

one step closer

okay, this is fucking awesome---dad got great grandfather's naturalization certificate in the mail yesterday! we're getting there. slowly, but still. :) now, i just have to pretend that i live with carissa in redlands, so that i can apply in los angeles instead of san fransisco (everyone says that the san fransisco people are horrible about processing things; the estimated delay is somewhere over two and a half years from submitting the application). and actually, this could work out really well, since siblings can submit parallel applications with only one set of certificates---so if i have her do it, i might be able to save myself a very expensive plane ticket to los angeles... that would rock. man, when i finally get that passport in my hot little hands, i am so throwing the hugest party ever to celebrate. hell yeah.

somewhat less awesome is that i'm still fighting this damn computer. at the suggestion of some webpages, i tried upgrading the bios firmware, and it really seemed like it had worked. of course, after it had been running for about two hours (previously, it would crap out after about five minutes), i decided that it was fixed, and wrote a victory message to a friend---not more than five minutes later, it nose-dived again. [rolls eyes] this is fucking ridiculous. i suppose it might actually be the processor that's having issues; it really does seems like it must be a temperature problem, but the thermometer claims that the processor temperature is less than half the cutoff point, so i don't know what the deal is. i tried running the memtest utility just now, and it did find some bad sectors, but it wasn't able to finish before the computer froze up. so, actually, i'm not even sure if the stuff it found was actually because of bad memory, or because the processor started to hiccup... i'll let it cool off for a while and then try it again.

we had 'movienight' at markus's apartment last night, like usual, but with everyone on vacation, it was just him, me, walter, and peter (and yannick showed up, but quite a bit later). anyway, somehow i convinced them to continue speaking german to each other, rather than switching for me. i'm impressed and glad that they actual did it, but boy, was that ever a wake up call. i mean, i know i'm just starting out, but the specific stuff on the tapes, i feel like i've learned pretty well. and i guess this would probably make me a very well-prepared tourist, when one is around friends, asking about directions or buying things and counting money or time suddenly doesn't seem so useful or helpful anymore. i understood very little of what was going on, with the exception of some proper nouns and conjunctions. and the occasional filler phrase or boilerplate response ("i don't know," or "i think so," etc.). of course, we didn't see a film, even though i had proposed and brought "crash," and we had planned on seeing it, but since there were so few of us, we played the original settlers game instead. it was fun, but i think fabius's neuremburg version is better. that, and i just felt like an idiot because there were even a few times where i should have been able to come up with the right words to make the better part of a coherent sentence in german, but whenever i opened my mouth, only nothing or nonsense ever came out. and of course, they were giving me a hard time about it... i know they only mean it in jest, and like i always say, "why do we tease? because we love." but if i didn't know better, i'd say i actually get made fun of all the much more for the extra effort that i put into things. what i'm trying to say is that i know they don't mean it seriously, but all the same, it starts to weigh down on you after a while. i'm trying as hard as i can, and i'm just getting flak for it. eh, i'll live. i'm just whining, is all.

but on the other hand, katja volunteered out of the blue to try to help me with my german, so i'm going to meet with her tomorrow afternoon for a couple hours. we'll see how that goes. i had a really strange thought this morning; probably it's totally disjoint from reality, but i wondered for the briefest moment, since it really is quite odd and random for her to just volunteer like that, if it might not be the case that she was perhaps slightly interested in me. which is in no way to say that this would be an unwelcome development, but it would probably be, i dunno, 'peculiar?' anyway, it's unlikely at best, but if it turns out that that actually is what's really going on, i suppose it might be good for me, even though the thought makes me massively uncomfortable at the moment. whoever said that "the longer you wait, the harder things become" definitely knew what they were talking about...

this afternoon, markus, peter, and i went out driving; in search of the sleeper strips they put on the road, so we could make take some measurements. i can't remember if i've mentioned this before, but we're playing around with a crazy idea i had a while back, that if we modulated the surface pattern, we could potentially make music, or even speech (okay, that's probably a stretch) instead of just a constant tone like they use now. yeah, i know, it's as useless as it is insane, but we're having fun. :) unfortunately, as a result, i didn't really get much work done today. and i'm not sure if this makes it better or worse, but alcherio is on vacation at the moment, so i don't even feel particularly bad or guilty for it. ha. hopefully i'll be able to kick my ass into high gear next week; if i don't have some stuff to show him by the time he gets back, i'm pretty sure that "happy camper" won't be the most apt of descriptions for his demeaner.

tomorrow night, some of us are going to geneva to have dinner with carol. she just moved there last weekend, after getting fed up with her psychotic flatmate in lausanne. it's almost certainly better for her, since she works in geneva, but we'll miss having her around here. anyway, she invited us over for dinner, and then afterwards we'll go see the fireworks for the 'fete de geneve,' which are supposed to be some of the biggest and most impressive anywhere. i figure it's worth a shot. :)

color me cranky (or "longing for the luxury of a luddite lifestyle")

okay, i'm perplexed. and kinda pissed.

i finally got the capacitors i needed for repairing my motherboard today. i soldered them in this evening, and then put everything back together.

guess what? hey, wow, you're right! how did you know?

clearly, it didn't work. and i have little if any clue what might be wrong now. by outward appearances it seems to be a temperature problem (will work for a short period after having been off for a while, but then starts behaving strangely after running a bit), but the bios thermometer shows both the cpu and the system temperature as well within range.

so far, all i can come up with is that it could be something to do with the video card; the fatal crash usually happens at the moment of a graphical context switch (like trying to display the bootsplash screen). although once there was actually a crc error when loading the kernel, which seems like a faulty hard drive. but if i use a knoppix cd, both hard drives look okay (at least as long as the system lasts), and i don't see why a messed up hard drive would cause problems with a knoppix boot image. i could try disconnecting them completely, but i don't think i can bear to open the case again tonight. it's just too frustrating. if it's a hard drive problem, interestingly enough, that's probably one of the better cases, since the hard drives are the only things in there that are still under warranty...

but what else is there, really? could it be a memory problem? the ram checks out fine during bootup, even the last time, right before it fails. i suppose the processor might be damaged, but i'm having a hard time imagining how it could work sometimes but not others like it's doing. or maybe the busted capacitors on the motherboard blew something else up, in a less visually obvious manner. this would be really shitty, since most things that could break i doubt if i'll be able to fix or even find.

i dunno. i'm just supremely annoyed right now. if anybody has any bright ideas, now's the time. thanks.

i have her, in concert (yo la tengo)

went to see the wedding present with rhinocerose and yo la tengo last night. it was pretty cool, but the levels were a little off (i guess it's pretty hard to get it right in and outdoor venue) so it was a bit too loud for my taste, and you couldn't really hear the voices well enough to understand them. it was also rather what i think people would describe as "experimental;" the main guy in yo la tengo kept doing weird shit like just hitting all the guitar strings at once and waving his hand randomly over various parts of the fingerboard, also using the bender bar at random times for no apparent reason, and then swinging the whole guitar over his head like a lasso, or intentionally trying to create feedback by dangling it like a pendulum in front of the amp. it was cool, and i enjoyed it a lot, but i think i probably would have gotten more out of it if i had been familiar with the music beforehand (a friend of mine told me this was a show not to be missed, and so i went despite never having heard any of the groups's work yet).

been running more regularly recently. like every weekend, and maybe once in between if i can manage it. now that i've gotten back into it, and after losing about ten pounds last month, it's getting much easier, but not quite to the point where i was last summer. i probably went 5 or 6 miles this afternoon. it's funny; it's so hard to judge one's own progress. i feel like i'm doing better, which to be fair, i probably am, and should count for something, but by yourself, there's not a whole lot to push against, even if you try. there was a guy that came up behind me when i felt like i was already going pretty fast, and he just blew right past. i tried keeping up with him for a while, but didn't last much longer than 20 or 30 seconds before i had to just suck it up and let him go. that was a little disheartening.

only sort of related (not at all an excuse, but something that needs to be done), i think i really need to get a new pair of running shoes. these ones that i have don't really have any spring left in them. well, i guess that's to be expected, seeing as they'll be seven years old in december; which is quite a long time, even considering that i've been very strict about only ever using them for running. it was kinda cute, in a sort of way, i suppose; they're still the most expensive shoes i've ever purchased (unless you count my snowboard boots last december), and in the beginning, i did basically everything but port them around on a velvet pillow... i carried them down to the track, put them on there to run, and then took them off again to walk back up the hill. :) reminiscence aside, though, my calves are really quite sore right now.

and not that anyone really cares except me, but this morning i weighed in at 68kg, which is another minor milestone (just under 150lbs). makes me happy, after being stuck on the 69.5-70.5 plateau for all of last week.

letting go (of compulsions)

i took a big step today. i'm trying to relax my tendencies to micromanage and monitor everything. as much as dave and the rest of the kahn brothers like to joke about "extensive records" and the keeping of such; even though i would laugh right along with them, i've long been obsessive about tracking my money, to the point of saving receipts and at times even balancing my wallet the way some people balance their checkbooks. so that i could account for exactly where all my money was going, down to the smallest coin.

today, i ordinarily would have done that for the huge pile of receipts that i had been piling up since the last time a couple of months ago. instead, i picked up the whole pile and tossed it straight into the wastepaper basket. letting go is far from easy, but i hope that this will prove to be a step in the right direction. hell, even at the grocery store this morning, i went through the checkout without having precalculated my total, so as to be sure that it came out correctly. i still watched as she did it, to make sure that each individual item was right (i don't want to get cheated), but i let the register do the addition, and didn't worry about it so much.

maybe i'm adapting to swiss behavior, and forty francs just doesn't mean as much to me as it used to, so i can spend it with less aprehension, or maybe i'm becoming lazier. regardless, i hope that by relaxing just a bit, i can simplify ever so slightly the ludicrous nonsense that makes up so much of my everyday life. i suppose that time will be the only reliable test of whether or not this is an improvement.

for lack of playmates

well, even despite talking about it the night before, yesterday morning i managed to completely forget that it was a holiday, and stupidly came to work anyway. it was quite lonely. so at lunchtime (since all the cafeterias were closed) i went home to get something to eat, and tried to find someong to go play in the sun with me. apparently everybody else had planned ahead and skipped town for the weekend, since nobody i knew was anywhere to be found. which was sad. so i tried to go running again, but either i need new shoes (well probably i do need new shoes in any case, these ones are close to 6 years old now), or running two consecutive days is a bad idea, or both; because i didn't make it nearly as far, and part of my right foot started to get that itchy irritated sort of feeling that portents a blister if you don't immediately stop whatever it is you're doing, which i did, since i hate blisters.

in the evening, i finally watched "garden state," which i found to be surprisingly good, if a little surreal. i guess it sort of resonated with me since i've been 'far away from home' for a really long time, and despite the fact that the people who seldom or never left town seem to think that i'm off doing exciting spectacular things, i haven't really accomplished anything, and i don't really have anything to show for it. there are so many things i want to do, but i stay paralyzed by indecisiveness, and instead do none of them. sigh.

jim called around 9:45 and i went down to meet him in ouchy for a closer view of the fireworks, which were actually quite spectacular, but other than that don't make for a particularly lengthy or interesting description.